Annie Heckman, It came back and cut down more, 2010, graphite, gouache, watercolor pencil, and marker on paper, 11.5 x 11.5 inches
If you’re in Chicago tonight, check out this amazing benefit at the International Museum of Surgical Science, including an auction with this drawing and one of the bone chandeliers from my exhibit there earlier this year.
Tomorrow is the day! Come visit me in the fourth floor lobby between 12 and 2pm at the MCA to see works on paper and pepper me with questions and opinions. Here’s a Raymond Pettibon piece to draw you in — this is one of eight of his works on view in this exhibit.
Raymond Pettibon -- No Title (To Dust Cover...Shut), 1984 -- Ink on paper -- Sheet: 14 x 10 1/8 in. (35.6 x 25.7 cm); framed: 18 11/16 x 15 (47.5 x 38.1 cm) -- Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Susan and Lewis Manilow -- Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles-- © 1984 Raymond Pettibon
If you’d like to learn more about Pettibon’s work ahead of time, the Art21 site or his page on David Zwirner’s site are good places to start.
Here are the details in case you’re new to the MCA:
Museum of Contemporary Art –> general visitor information
220 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611-2643
Google map
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.
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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.
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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
The gallery has extended the reception to 11.30 tonight! Here’s a photo of the installation.
Airline to Heaven, Part II, 2010, animation projection, screen fabric, wood, paper, tacks, gouache, graphite, marker, 120 x 84 x 144 inches, animation duration: 3 minutes, 54 seconds, installed at NY Studio Gallery
MISC Video and Performance
June 3 - July 3
Performances and Reception June 4; 7-11:30pm
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
Annie Heckman, Airline to Heaven, Part II, 2010, animation still
Four years ago, shortly after finishing my master’s degree, I was honored and excited to see my first animation, Airline to Heaven, Part I, screen at NY Studio Gallery as part of their MISC Performance & Video series. This year gallery owner Kristen Copham and director Zeina Assaf (both amazing) are adding installation work to the mix, and including the second part of my series, Airline to Heaven, Part II — a long-worked but brand new animation installation that has never been shown before. There will be rabbits, hell-mouths, kittens, the works.
Find the details below and please join us at the opening June 4 if you’re in NYC!
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MISC Video & Performance
June 3 - July 3, 2010
Reception and Performances: June 4, 7-10pm
NY Studio Gallery is pleased to present the 5th Annual MISC Video and Performance. A multi-media experience featuring a variety of emerging, mid-career and established artists working in diverse genres ranging from video, animation, live performance, or video installation. Video loops and installations will be accessible during gallery hours, while performances are scheduled during reception night.
Video Installations include:
Ron Diorio extends his documentary practices through What I did during the war. Peter Dobill presents his riveting Bloodbreather video. Interaction and attempted manipulation of natural landscapes makes up Murray Dwertman’s Upper Buttermilk Falls. Airline to Heaven, Part II is Annie Heckman’s animation projection at the end of a long tunnel of drawn dirt and bones. Lynn Herring’s Man’s Inner Reflections is a sculpture that is created with mirrors and video. In Mutes I-V Ryan Kuo dramatically slows down TV footage highlighting unnoticed glitches. Yuliya Lanina creates and exhibits racy animatronic characters in Mishka. In the intimate video Sex-Ed, Matthew de Leon attempts to fill in for an X-rated adult actress. Jennie Thwing creates a miniature diorama of forest with fields, tents and celestial projections. Undulating corner projections by Naho Tariushi come back for their second time at MISC. Ina Yun creates animation projections on made and found objects.
Projected Animation Loop: Jonathan Monaghan, Kanako Okazaki, Ben Pederson, Lai-Chung Poon, Elise Roedenbeck, Devlin Shea, Carmen Tiffany.
Video Loop: Arielle Falk, Jason Head, Morrisa Maltz, Liz Rodda, Bradly Dever Treadaway, Traci Tullius, Joy Whalen.
Rooftop projection: Weather permitting Kyung Woo Han projects two videos reconstructing well-known 2-D imagery from 3-D spaces.
Performances: Hector Canonge presents MALATTIA a multimedia performance using hospital screens and silhouettes to address the AIDS issue. Genevieve White performs Loss using a sculptural cocoon. Mike Richison improvises acoustic inventions on his vacuum-based instrument.
MISC images: French Penguin by Jonathan Monaghan is an animation of an emperor penguin fused with Gothic architecture. Morrisa Maltz creates her own world in Weird Marching Army.
About NY Studio Gallery
NY Studio Gallery combines exhibition and workspace to create an atmosphere of interaction, collaboration and integration of media, styles and artistic genres for US and international artists.
NY Studio Gallery
154 Stanton Street @ Suffolk, New York, NY 10002
info@nystudiogallery.com l 212.627.3276l www.nystudiogallery.com
Thursday - Saturday 12 - 6pm or by appointment
The third and last drawing staying in Hungary for now. More to come (including animation) after my return to Chicago.
Annie Heckman, The bones crumble later, and so the skeleton remains altogether, the way it was, 2010, graphite, gouache, watercolor pencil, and oil pastel on paper, 9 x 9 inches
The second drawing in a set of three, staying to be exhibited in Hungary:
Annie Heckman, When it is 100 years old it will be exactly like a piece of wood, 2010, graphite, gouache, watercolor pencil, and oil pastel on paper, 9 x 9 inches
The first of three drawings that I’m leaving in Hungary, to be exhibited in 2010:
Annie Heckman, It has a key to everywhere, so it can open the doors, 2010, graphite, gouache, watercolor pencil, and oil pastel on paper 9 x 9 inches
The title is a quotation from Maria Nagy’s study on children’s theories about death.
Annie Heckman, Szechenyi Bridge, December 29, 2009
You told me that the end of life looks just like the mouth of a broad tunnel: a project on Budapest’s Labyrinth and Bridges
I’m writing from the second week of my residency at the Hungarian Multicultural Center, directed by Beata Szechy. In the winter of 2005-6, I came to the same residency with many questions, and left with more. This time I decided to return to Budapest to explore its labyrinth and bridges as a way of developing imagery imagining the mythic underworld tunnels of hell and the pearly gates of heaven. Who knew that drawing hell could be so fun?
In considering visual metaphors for death, loss, and the afterlife, I turned to the Budavari Labirintus, Budapest’s underground labyrinth, as a physical starting point. The bridges of Budapest, as well as various grand portals, are helping me produce a different set of elements in these images. Somewhere tucked in my mind from early musings on the potential of post-life existence are two distinct and opposed visions: underground tunnels signifying an uncertain and painful hell, and palatial entryways leading the way to cloudy heights.
To set the verbal side of my mind in motion, I’ve been looking at the writings of Maria Nagy, a Hungarian psychologist who investigated the relationship between age and comprehension of death, most notably in her 1948 study with children and adolescents in Budapest. In many cases these children knew death quite well, and their poetic interpretations of its mechanisms are striking.
Annie Heckman, Wine fountain, Budavari Labirintus, December 31, 2009
Nagy describes the children as creating theories about death to reflect their understandings of the world at different developmental stages. These writings are tied to the labyrinth and bridges only by location, and came up as I was researching a potential collaboration together with (lovely, talented) artist Elise Goldstein. Without these words my project would be floating somewhere between tourism and solitary studio work; they are shifting the way I engage with the images.
I arrived in Budapest knowing that I wanted to make at drawings and a book, and committed to an animation and installation once I arrived and saw the richness of the imagery. After much daytime exploring with nighttime studio work, I’m having a more settled day in the studio. I’ll be leaving a few drawings with Beata in Hungary, bringing some home, and continuing the work on the project when I get back to the states. The animation will join the drawings back in Budapest when it is exhibited later this year.
Check back for some photos, a reading list, and updates on the project (and yes New Year’s is total madness here).
Annie Heckman, Studio table in Budapest, January 5, 2010
The series of drawings I’m developing is specially priced as a fund-raising project to support my two-week residency. 10% of the purchase price will be donated to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. When you purchase a drawing you have the option to receive updates from me about the residency, as well as an e-book giving you a more in-depth view of the project in 2010. New works will be posted for sale as I complete them and work will shipped when I return to the states after January 15. Find the drawings online here.
Annie Heckman, You told me that looking at dead things is a path through mourning, 2009, gouache, ink, and graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches
Jeriah Hildwine, a fellow artist and friend, has been using sex, violence, and death in his paintings for years. So when he asked me to be in an exhibit he was curating, I had some idea what the emphasis would be. That’s What She Said (a phrase I associate first with Michael Scott from The Office, then Jeriah) especially held my attention because of the way it connects up to Jeriah’s real life and an intelligent, vibrant circle of likeminded artists that has sprung up in Chicago, with offshoots and comrades in Baltimore and New York (or maybe it traveled here with us from New York and Baltimore, either way there are lots of us here).
These are artists who are making work about sexuality and mortality, talking about these topics constantly, reading up on controversial issues in tandem, and creating some vivid dialogues about how we engage with physicality and the limitations of the body. Jeriah selected all female artists for this exhibit, pulling together work in performance, drawing, photography, and installation to explore how women are digging into issues surrounding sexuality and mortality.
As Jeriah writes in his curatorial essay,
“The exhibition presents work by young, emerging female artists, whose work shares certain aesthetic and thematic sensibilities. The work in this exhibition celebrates sincerity over irony, craftsmanship over cleverness, and a Baroque richness rather than simplicity or restraint. . . .These are artists who are acutely aware of their own bodies, their own physicality, and their own mortality. Their work exhibits a sensuality which transcends and appropriates objectification. They look Death in the face, and while they may not laugh, they do not blink, either.”
My contribution for this incarnation of the exhibit was a series of three drawings, based on the unfortunate mouse in Becoming Formless; the first in the set appears above. Having the opportunity to work with a curator whose interest in the grotesque and baroque is so intertwined with the purpose of the show has been an interesting experience; in the selection process we were eliminating works that weren’t gross enough, a good challenge.
This collection of works, on view through 8 pm today at the Benton House in Chicago as part of Version>09, is ready to morph and travel after an engaging few days at this first stop. I stood in the exhibit space yesterday and watched as group after group stood by Stephanie Burke’s raw meat-based photographs and said “Eeeeeyuch,” and I’m looking forward to doing it again soon.
