From One, Many

ARKANSAS — Working both in Arkansas and closer to his New Jersey studio, Shea Hembrey was clearly up to something. No one knew exactly what. But he’d pulled friends and family into photo shoots, used them to help set up potential works and completed enough material to raise curiosity.

“All my friends knew was that I was doing a lot of weird stuff,” says Hembrey while taking a break from his next project.

Perhaps weird is a good adjective. Wonderful fits, too.

Hembrey created “Seek,” a biennial of art that debuted in 2011. Like other biennials, it collected examples of visual art spanning a wide breadth of the contemporary landscape, from painting to installations to sculpture and more. Unlike other biennials, Hembrey created all the artwork featured in the project. He dreamed up 100 different artists with different styles and biographies, then made representative works for each of them. The collected works became “Seek.”

Hembrey will revisit some of the ideas on Sunday when he speaks at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The talk, called “Imagination on a Global Scale with Arkansasborn Artist Shea Hembrey,” will be moderated by Niki Stewart, the museum’s director of education and exhibitions.

Although he didn’t visit a museum until he was in his 20s, Hembrey says he had been training for “Seek” his entire life. He was raised in Hickory Grove, in the heart of the Ozark National Forest between Clarksville and Harrison. He completed art projects while in grade school, then studied art at the university level for about nine years, passing throughLyon College in Batesville before obtaining a master of fine arts from Cornell University.

Some thought “Seek” wasa gimmick, and that no one could complete all the various works included in the catalog. But Hembrey resisted thetemptation to fool the art world into thinking he had found 100 unique artists represented in no other collection.

“I really was clear. I wanted to be honest from the beginning,” he says.

He maintains knowledge of all of the artists he created, saying his impression of them shifts over time. Included in the biennial - all fictional, of course - are artists such as Azar Rezazadeh, an Iranian influenced by the Iran-Iraq war;

Sebastian Rue, a French artist driven to collect things; K.M.

Yoon, a South Korean stoneworker; and 97 more.

After the initial buzz created by “Seek,” Hembrey has returned to doing work more reminiscent of what he created prior to the biennial exhibit. That means, unlike other biennials, there won’t be another version of “Seek” in 2013 with 100 new artists. He’s been working in Arkansas since Christmastime, experimenting with a series of works that requires gunpowder.

“It’s a lot keeping all those voices in my head,” Hembrey says. “It’s nice to be doing my own work.”