But That’s No Way To Tell You is an interdisciplinary installation which explores the ways in which both technology and academic thought affect our ability to communicate. Through the use of photography, machine writing, and printing techniques both archaic and contemporary, Mason Hershenow asks the viewer to consider how they separate fact and opinion in an age where it has never been easier to combine the two.

Mason Hershenow’s Bio:

Mason Hershenow is a photographer, writer, and institutional critic working to highlight redundant and exclusionary systems in academic art and beyond.

Influenced by the tools we build and use to interact with ourselves, each other, and the world around us, Hershenow's work focuses on the relationship — and distance — between contemporary photography and the academic art world. Originally trained as a straight photographer, Hershenow’s practice frequently blends candid, often personal images with elements of modernist design, traditional and contemporary typesetting, and the use and misuse of academic language in order to challenge the viewer’s notions of who and what establishes expertise and validity in galleries, lecture halls, and other formal spaces. Far from an anti-academic, Hershenow’s goal is to use institutional critique as a means of illuminating and weakening the most harmful mechanisms of exclusion built into contemporary academic, artistic, and social systems.

Hershenow is a northern California native. He earned his Bachelor of Art in photography from Sacramento State University in 2014 and his Master of Fine Art in photography from San José State University is 2020, where he also taught a number of introductory photography courses. In September 2020, he founded it's no sam studios and began hosting Meaning What, a podcast exploring conversations missing in fine art and culture.

Find out more about the artist at: mhershenow.com