Annie Heckman, Green stars, 2006, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 9 x 12 inches, Collection Lorien Jordan (appears in Airline to Heaven, Part II animation)
Writing from the road: the opening last night was beautiful. Everyone at the gallery (Mae, Zeina, Mark, Louis) was so helpful and kind throughout the installation, and cared as much about this piece as I did. It means a lot to me when someone notices that a piece is off by an inch and hops on a ladder up to the ceiling to fix it without hesitation. The show runs through July 3 (details below) and I’ll be updating with more photos, stills, and clips shortly. If you do get a chance to stop by the gallery, please drop me a line in the guest book and/or call me up to tell me about it!
In the midst of wrapping up this project I was asked to write a statement about the piece, and have put together what reads more like a compact essay. This piece, Part II of a three-part series of works, is complex in that it bridges a set of works, neither introducing nor completing an idea, and writing about it helped me to create my own window onto the development of the project. With the recent death of Louise Bourgeois, I’ve been considering how much her approach to the reality of family relationships and the visual resonances of psychoanalysis have influenced my thinking.
—————————————–
Artist Statement : Airline to Heaven, Part II
I made Airline to Heaven, Part II to narrate a transition: the placement of a set of dead characters into an airplane so that they could fly to heaven. Part I of this series visually introduced the characters, Part III will reveal what they find in the sky, and Part II needed to get them on the plane. I solve the classic narrative problem of moving a character from one room to another by making the human and animals explode out of the picture plane into the aircraft, and by showing you that they have arrived at their seats with a shot of the bunny at the window as the airplane takes off at the end of the short animation.
Woody Guthrie wrote out the lyrics to Airline to Heaven with a nod to the conventions of air travel, including tickets and seating. Years later, Jeff Mangum again envisioned air travel as a metaphor for the afterlife, setting out the notion that our ashes would circle the earth in the lyrics of In an Aeroplane Over the Sea. Every time I imagine these possibilities I feel a tug of transcendent potential and a simultaneous grounding in the deniability of such a concrete metaphor: there is no physical place in the sky, no airplane waiting for me, no reunion.
Drawing from this conflicted response to the hope of a heaven airline, I create a feverish layering of imagery, regenerative movements, indicators of magic, and an acknowledgment of certain physical accompaniments to death: blood, the blue diamond pattern on a hospital gown, the dirt of a grave. The metaphor of an Airline to Heaven becomes the entry point for a mode of imagination that allows us to create scenarios beyond our own experience, a mental space where shared affections and loss are given full expression with the symbolic renderings of death and regeneration. I constructed the animation piece at the center of a spatially layered, drawn hell-mouth, and made it the most life-giving hell-mouth I could imagine in order to capture the cyclical nature of any afterlife construction.
As I told my father when I decided to dedicate this piece to him, the animation would be a bloodbath, almost from start to finish. This is fulfilled in the piece, but the blood flits in and out as red water, as a transition, and as a frame through which images are viewed. In a similar way, the limit point of death serves as a framework for retracing attachment, loss, and affection. I dedicated this piece to my father because he has been my closest partner in trying to prevent and confront a particular loss.
—————————————–
Airline to Heaven, Part II will be on view this month as part of
MISC Video and Performance
June 3 - July 3
NY Studio Gallery
154 Stanton St @ Suffolk in the LES New York, NY 10002
JMZ or F trains to Delancey / Essex
www.nystudiogallery.com 212.627.3276 info [at] nystudiogallery.com
Hours: Thurs - Sat, noon - 6 pm or by appointment
and am finding myself comparing more and more structures to fabric, and it certainly applies to this project. If you have an artist in your life who works anything like I do, take a quick mental snapshot of a work table in the midst of a big project. There’s a logic, a complex layering, and a sense to be made of diverse sources, objects, and materials. This is the feeling that Robert has recreated, right down to strips of blue tape that Jason uses for masking.
.
