While Oliver Herring began working with sculpture in the early 1990s, by 1998 he had transitioned to video and thus began his fascination with moving, silhouetted or shadowed figures. In his early works, Herring employed stop motion, such as in Videosketch #1 (1998). Since then, his work has evolved to include large casts and elaborate sets of cardboard and other props. By 2002, with the work Little Dances of Misfortunes, Herring had begun to explore the possibilities of multi-channel works. Herring's pieces, writes Kley, "both celebrate and transcend the ordinary".