Hey friends – I was asked to speak on this panel because of my work with StepSister Press. With a shout out to Robert Sedlack for designing one of StepSister’s most beautiful books, I’m honored to chime in. It’s free and open — just RSVP by the 28th if you’d like to attend!
Our exhibit + residency at the International Museum of Surgical Science open this weekend! I’ve been working on a book project with Rebecca Keller about the Excavating History Collective, and they kindly invited me to join in with this series of interventions in the museum space. The postcard appears below, along with some text about my role in the project. It’s an amazing space and I’ll be working on an animation and drawing project there through December — hours to be posted soon and I look forward to visitors any time!
A few notes on my piece — you can find it in progress on the 3rd floor, Gallery 3B:
Annie Heckman, Open, 2011
animation projection, works on paper, furniture from the museum collection
Throughout the residency period, Annie Heckman will be using the museum’s collection of objects, films, and texts to complete an animation project and series of drawings. Looking at the creation of an opening in the skull, and at the way we project psychological boundaries and openings onto an architectural space like the museum, Heckman is most interested in what has been at stake in the mutual trust implicit in trephination, in the dignity of forming such trust, and in investigating how fascinations with the practice have accompanied its most practical surgical implications. Viewing both the skull and the building as weird containers for dynamic interaction, Heckman will be inserting her studio practice into the museum’s collection as a way to extend her research on mortality and the workings of the mind.
Darrell Roberts put together an awesome mix of work for this exhibit at 2ND FLR Gallery, courtesy of Arno Mayorga, opening this Friday. He chose Becoming Formless, an installation that has only been exhibited twice, starting back when Anni Holm premiered it at artXposium in 2008. The piece has some loose basis in a sutra and Stand By Me, and is the first of my installations to glow in the dark. It’s appearing alongside work from Fraser Taylor, Stephanie Burke, Tom Burtonwood, and Chris Hammes. I’m honored + hope you can join us!
Annie Heckman, You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time, photographed at the International Museum of Surgical Science, 2010
You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time is appearing again, in a restructured format and in new surroundings, at the Evanston Art Center in February 2011. Susan Sensemann, artist, curator, writer, and it just so happens my (smart, inspiring, influential) professor from the UIC days, is curating an exhibit called Physiotasmagorical, an exploration of mystical and medical overlappings through drawing, painting, installation, and fiber. Just a quick save-the-date now and more musings on the project to follow.
Exhibit Dates: February 20-April 17, 2011
Opening and Panel: February 20, 1-4 pm, panel at 2 pm
Featured artists include Jerry Bleem, Carolynn Desch, Christa Donner, LJ Douglas, Annie Heckman, Alison Hiltner, Barbara F. Kendrick, Paul Nudd, Lindsay Obermeyer, and Susan Smith Trees.
The Evanston Art Center is located at 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201.
While I was working at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, I shifted back and forth across the Illinois border periodically throughout the semester, visiting friends, my apartment at the time, installing exhibits, and eating certain delicious sandwiches that had my attention at the Daily Grill. On one of these visits home I came across a mouse decaying rapidly in our building’s courtyard, completely overrun by maggots, to the point that it looked like it had become a different, more differentiated, life form.
As much as I loved old Nine Inch Nails videos and the sutras describing meditation on a decaying corpse, the mouse disturbed me more than thrilled me when I returned to Indiana. I was working on Airline to Heaven, Part II at the time, but took one of many detours in this project. This is one piece that I redrew almost entirely after trying a shortcut for the last time — as you may notice, it would be very tempting to use a clone stamp or some algorithm to achieve this effect, but those maggots are hand-drawn one-by-one after much trial and error.
Annie Heckman, Becoming Formless, 2008 wood, wire, fabric, vellum, gouache, phosphorescent paint, small motors dimensions variable (approximately 180 x 80 x 120 inches)
Becoming Formless first screened in 2007 at NY Studio Gallery at its original space in Chelsea, and a year later took shape with its glow-in-the-dark installation at Anni Holm & Irene Pérez’s artXposium 2.0 in West Chicago. The installation consists of paper grass pieces woven through painted metal wires poking up from wooden bases, with stuffed cloth rock forms providing seating.
Annie Heckman, Becoming Formless, 2008, wood, wire, fabric, vellum, gouache, phosphorescent paint, small motors, dimensions variable (approximately 180 x 80 x 120 inches)
Annie Heckman, Love in outer space and under water, 2007, animation still
This was my second animation, created as a silent piece in four channels, kindly commissioned by the South Bend Museum of Art for ‘Meet Me on the Island’, curated by Jason Lahr.
It was a family event. No animals should explode! It was a good challenge. I thought of my mom, and the polar bear at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and created this work.
I wrote a short essay about the piece at the time. Here is an excerpt:
A human experiencing love in outer space is possible, a human experiencing love very far under water is possible, but they are both a stretch. For a landlubber like me, these circumstances involve fantasy, an increased possibility of death, and anxiety. This piece is about loving someone and wanting to shoot this person in a rocket into outer space. It’s about going scuba diving together and ripping off the gear, getting the bends, and floating around with the sharks. It’s about expecting your dead friends and loved ones to emerge from the ether on a starry night. It’s about these things happening abstractly, in relation to nature. It is stupid and earnest and happy.
I’m hosting a retrospective of my animations, right here on the blog.
After years of keeping only segments online, I’ve set up a YouTube channel online with the full pieces. I’ll post them here starting back in 2006 with my first animation work, and move forward in time up until — (drum roll) Letters to a Lost Penguin, my piece premiering at Swimming Pool Project Space this August. Now just crank up your speakers, relax, and enjoy these works with added imagining of high resolution and installed environments!
Annie Heckman, Airline to Heaven, Part I installation, 2006, wood, paint, fabric, screen material, animation projection, dimensions variable, installed at Moreau Art Galleries, 2008
Thanks as always to Muzsikás for the kind permission to use their music in this project.
Jason Lahr's studio
(first posted on the StepSister Press blog)
Lately I’m feeling lucky — lucky to have a family and home that support the explosion of art and publishing projects into the cave, and lucky to be learning new ways to help good things happen for words and images.
Jason and Robert are two big heroes of this lucky era!
So I’m feeling particularly fortunate to be seeing (and smelling — they smell amazing!) the new print run of Words for Paintings. This book was a first in two ways — the first StepSister book to fully feature ONE artist’s writings and images, and the first to be filtered through the careful and innovative mind of an outside designer (not me this time — I phoned it in from a train between Prague and Berlin, what better way to watch magic happen?).
I am still overwhelmed at how unique the product of this collaboration is. Jason Lahr’s writings have some clear overlap with his paintings (they’re like, in them) but having the opportunity to read them at greater length in a sit-down format has given me an entirely different view onto his world. Do you know the feeling you get when you read someone’s work and are sheepish the next time you see the person, for all good reasons? This is what happened to me after reading his fuller texts.
Then Robert Sedlack took all this material and did something I can best compare to weaving. I’ve been reading some Bruno Latour
These books are beautiful. I feel lucky and kind of awesome and smart having my copy at home.
Here’s the link if you’re ready to hold this book in your hands and put it on your shelf. And here’s where to go if you want to grab a copy while you shop for other books on Amazon
And here’s a link to the place where you can learn about Jason’s work if you’d like to enjoy it in person: Packer Schopf Gallery.
If you’ve followed this site for a while, you may have noticed that I keep my alter-ego at StepSister Press fairly separate. And the blog over there hasn’t been updated since the moon landing. So it may be some surprise to see me propping up a StepSister book here. It just isn’t done.
We’re finishing up a new printing of Words for Paintings (Jason Lahr, design by Robert Sedlack), so as I’m shuffling through the numbers and looking into the possibility of making a hardcover version, and thinking about how on earth this book could be ‘read’ in the traditional sense of an author’s book reading, I wanted to put in a few personal words about it, de-publisher-voiced. I’ll do it here, and then perhaps use this new mode to thrash the dead-StepSister-blog-horse later on. In this post I’ll tell you how much I love Jason’s work, and later this week I’ll tell you how much I love Robert’s work, and why I think their collaboration is so brilliant.
First of all: I love Jason’s paintings. I’m not a neat person, and as such learned early on how to resent the flatness of flat and the taped-ness of taped edges. But Jason does neatness so seamlessly, and uses it to house the images of the painting like a screen: the flat, smooth screen of messy adolescent remembrances, a rich display for the projection of wishes and fantasies.
Then there are the writings. Jason draws on pop references and certain remote voices, but in the end he lets you into his own (twisted - - sorry Jason) world more than the surface might suggest. Please imagine yourself for a moment drafting a detailed note to a print vendor to make sure that the following words are italicized: Dear baby, welcome to Dumpsville, population: you… If you want to do something that indulges in your-favorite-things multiplied by your-oddest-thoughts in a critical way, then doing it with a rigorous studio habit and attention to detail seems to be the way to go. It allows you to send that message to a publisher, “Just so you know — ‘welcome to dumpsville’ is not in italics.” This specificity is the part of working with Jason, and his texts, that I love the most. While his approach to painting and writing has some raw enthusiasm at its core, it is a thoughtful, carefully edited way of working.
Then there is Jason. Jason’s (amazing awesome artist) partner Krista Hoefle has been in Chicago doing a residency with Anchor Graphics, and we had the chance to see them the other day. Jason is a brilliant, dedicated artist, curator, and educator, has a cool dog, and is the nicest of nice guys. It makes it a pleasure to throw yourself behind his work. He’s able to talk about the complex expectations and symbols for masculinity, with humor, because he has such a lovely sense of humor about himself.
Here’s his book on our site (signed copies available): http://bit.ly/cbqKSe
And here it is on Amazon:
Or here’s the PayPal button to buy it straight from StepSister (signed copies available) if you’re feeling so great about this book that you don’t even want to click around on the site ($45 + $2 discounted shipping):
There are a few pieces of news I haven’t posted in detail here, waiting for bits of logistical dust to settle. Here are the big good facts:
- In 2008, Lorien Jordan asked me to join her in making work about Antarctica, a topic with which she had become appropriately obsessed.
- In 2009, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs awarded me a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant to make glow-in-the-dark iceberg sculptures for that project
- Realizing that the icebergs needed quite a bit of company to create a full installation and animation, I applied for the Individual Artist Support Initiative Artist Project grant with the Illinois Arts Council in spring of 2010.
- In May 2010, I received this award!
- With this generous assistance from the Illinois Arts Council and the enthusiastic support of owner and curator Liz Nielsen I’m able to present this project together with Lorien’s works at Swimming Pool Project Space in Chicago, a fantastic space less than a mile from my home.
Save these dates to celebrate with us in person this summer!
LOVE LETTERS TO ANTARCTICA
Annie Heckman + Lorien Jordan
(August 21-September 12)
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 21, 2010, 7-10pm
Artist Talk with Annie Heckman: Sunday, August 22, 2010, 2pm
Swimming Pool Project Space, 2858 W. Montrose, Chicago, IL 60618
— In addition to wanting lots of friends in the art world to enjoy this with me, I’m also working to make this project available to young people nearby, as well as Antarctic researchers and enthusiasts. Please pass on this information and get in touch with me if you have suggestions or requests!
