ANNIE HECKMAN

—> an essay where I get to say ‘freak bitch’ in context. Check out Lady Gaga’s video below and then head over to read my piece in the Chicago Art Magazine.

I’m so honored that Maurizio Pellegrin has decided to include my piece Becoming Formless in this exhibit  — check out more information on the site for Visions in New York City. The closing reception is Friday, November 13, and sadly I won’t be able to make it to the reception. Please celebrate for me, New Yorkers!

Please save the date and join us if you’re free! I’ll be speaking about my work for the graduate sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on Friday, November 13 at 4.15 pm. I found out that it’s generously open to the public and I think it’s going to be interesting — I’ll be focusing on my work from the last four years, including some writing, and it will be my most comprehensive talk to date in terms of how the writing and studio practice inform one another.

SAIC Artist Talk poster - design by Elise Goldstein

After much gnashing of teeth and so on, a new artist statement has emerged. I’m feeling particular gratitude to Juliet Jacobson, for initiating an exchange of writings that helped me sort out ideas, and to Elise Goldstein, who gave me a deadline related to an upcoming talk and a long chat about my work over coffee the other day. This is the first statement I’ve had that feels like it’s in the same camp with my other writings, so I’m grateful and pleased.

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My work has four elements: love, death, people, and animals. These form the starting points for anything I make. Love and death are two limit points of experience, and people and animals are able to approximate an encounter with those limits.

I make different structures using these parts: drawings, animations, installations, and writings. Elements of landscape and architecture appear throughout these works: walls, grass, icebergs, dirt, and the ocean. These function as sets and props to support the characters in these awkward tragedies: cats and dogs, dead relatives, rodents, the kid, and the brain doctor.

My experiences influence the specificity of these characters, settings, and themes. When I was a kid, I walked down the train tracks to the edge of town with my friend to look at a huge dead crow. I felt a kinship with the boys in Stand By Me with this coming of age, but of course my encounter was much simpler. Still: the moldering bird, a bunny my dog tried to eat—these were my first forays into an inkling of mortality, an understanding that has since broadened and deepened inevitably and against my desires. Faced with the impossibility of characterizing mortality, I look back to these moments of awe to formulate a language for approaching death and loss. I want my viewers to remake these early encounters with me, to become my companions in brief confrontations with the unknown.

Looking deeply into anything with wonder is a form of re-generation and of self-abuse. This is the connective thread running through religion, love, sex, death, and all methods of amplifying the imagination. Making something to look at deeply with wonder is particularly complicated.

You ate my year, but I love you.

Annie Heckman, iceberg installation, 2009, foam, winterstone, gesso, phosphorescent paint

Annie Heckman, iceberg installation, 2009, foam, winterstone, gesso, phosphorescent paint (detail)

initial proposal sketch of iceberg installation

This project is supported by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the
City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Annie Heckman, A short dream about trains and prairies, from before you moved south, 2 minutes 37 seconds (animation still)

Friday, October 2 (tomorrow!), Brown Rice is hosting an event for the Chicago Calling Arts Festival, including a surprise screening of my new animation piece, A short dream about trains and prairies, from before you moved south. Here’s all the information:

Chicago Calling at Brown Rice
Friday, October 2, 10-11.30pm
4432 N Kedzie Ave
Chicago IL 60625
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Doors open 30 minutes before the show begins. Brown Rice is a half block north of the Montrose / Kedzie intersection, close to the Kedzie station on the CTA brown line. The entrance is below a sign that reads “Perfect”.
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1st set: performance by Chicago Phonography

2nd set: Set of live music, videos by Jayve Montgomery, Annie Heckman,
and Mikey Peterson.
Performers include:
Gregory O’Drobinak — Arc of the Oven / Chicago
Jayve Montgomery — saxophones and percussion
Jim Ryan — kalimba / Oakland
Williwaw — amplified ukulele / Edinburgh
Ernesto Sturm Diaz-Infante San Francisco
Ritwik Banerji — saxophone / Chicago
Steve Dalanchinsky poetry — New York City
Jon Godston — soprano saxophone / Chicago
Michael Staron — bass / Chicago
Jimmy Bennington — drums / Chicago

http://www.chicagophonography.org $5 suggested donation

Thank you as always to Dan Godston for supporting my work!

Annie Heckman, A short dream about trains and prairies, from before you moved south, 2 minutes 37 seconds (animation still)

Open Studios are back for 2009 — send your friends to the event listing on the Chicago Artists Resource or pass on the details below:

West Carroll Open Studios
Sunday, October 25, 2009 12:00pm - 7:00pm

Artists open their studios throughout this recently renovated industrial building on Chicago’s West side. Projects include work from Andrew Ayer, Jared Dreyer, Jonathan Gitelson, Annie Heckman, Arielle Marq, Anton Mackey, Harold Mendez, Mike Olson, and Jennifer Scott. Annie Heckman will present a curatorial talk about the Chicago Cultural Center’s Synesthetic Plan of Chicago at 5.30 pm.

3200 West Carroll Avenue
Chicago, IL 60624
Google Map

Contact: Annie Heckman, +1 847.977.3834, annieheckman@gmail.com

Annie Heckman, You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time, 2009

Annie Heckman; A short dream about trains and prairies, from before you moved south; animation still; thank you to the West Chicago City Museum, 2009

artXposium is up and running again this year for its annual exhibit, in a new form, at the West Chicago City Museum.

Curators Anni Holm and Irene Pérez have challenged us to work more closely with West Chicago as a place, and for my project I decided to delve into the archives at the museum, with the generous help and hospitality of museum curator Sally DeFauw, who helped me sift through the archives when I had a broad starting point of trying to capture something about the city’s history as a railroad town. The process was so interesting and I only scratched the surface.

Combining the images I found with my own memories of growing up in a nearby midwestern town, I created an animation piece called A short dream about trains and prairies, from before you moved south. This piece is being installed together with an amazing train set in the museum’s collection, and uses footage of that train set as a starting point.

Details below if you can join us this weekend! More information and follow-up to come, and in the meantime check out Kathryn Born’s coverage of the exhibit on Art Talk Chicago.

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Locations:
West Chicago City Museum, 132 Main Street in West Chicago, IL 60185
Gallery 200
Main Street Storefronts
19th century CB&Q Depot
West Chicago Public Library District

Friday, September 18:
7-10pm - Meet the Artists Potluck, screening of Reach the Rock

Saturday, September 19: Open 11am-10pm
2pm - guided tour with the curators
5-10pm closing reception with an artist talk by Danish Artist in Residence, Berit Nørgaard, performances by Alison Rhoades, Core Project, Kathryn Born, and John & Mandy Rakow, along with food, drinks, and a silent auction.

artXposium is curated by Anni Holm and Irene Pérez and organized in conjunction with the West Chicago International Artist in Residency Program featuring Berit Nørgaard’s project: If I Can Do It - You Can Do It Too.

Lorien Jordan, Jimmy Pig Meets the Emperor (detail), 2008, pen and ink on paper, 22 x 15 inches

Love Letters to Antarctica is an exhibit created by artists Lorien Jordan and Annie Heckman to take on an uncanny, wistful outsider’s view of Antarctica’s history, landscape, and animal life. With research of visual and narrative information ranging from journals of the early explorers of modern Antarctica to cinematic explorations by Jacques Cousteau and Werner Herzog, these artists create a project that both explores the limitations of our understandings of Antarctica’s environment and revels in the emotional space of longing for distant, life-threatening adventure.

Annie Heckman, in-progress installation, 2009, foam, winterstone, gesso, phosphorescent paint, 36 x 60 x 60 inches

Lorien Jordan’s drawings:
Love Letters to Antarctica is Lorien Jordan’s sonnet to the explorers and the explored. It is a suite of simple line drawings and etchings that exists as a moody narrative, highlighting both the naivety, brutality, and sometimes absurdity of human involvement in the early days of modern Antarctica. For the last five years Jordan has obsessively read and collected everything she could find about the history of people in Antarctica. These stories have given her mental images and inspiration for the melancholic scenarios of the stolen moments she portrays in her work.

Lorien Jordan, Prepared to Wait, 2008, pen and ink on paper, 16 x 18 inches

The diaries of the explorers and their men were originally published to emphasize the conquering hero, but Jordan has found the side notes more telling and interesting, as they show glimpses of the fragility of the men underneath. These glimpses range from the comparison of the explorers to a boat-load of Peter Pans to one diarist’s description of how the sun’s reflection on the ice looked like kittens playing. Jordan picks out these details and amplifies them in her work, in turn fetishizing the continent in a way that echoes the activities of the Victorian explorers who hauled their china, crystal, and pianos to Antarctica to plant flags in the snow.

Annie Heckman, in-progress installation (detail), 2009, foam, winterstone, gesso, phosphorescent paint, 36 x 60 x 60 inches

Annie Heckman’s installation:
The space created in the installation is an image of a place as received by dreamers from afar, using bits of evidence from filmmakers and explorers to build a surreal, emotional installation of Antarctic landscape, filled with phosphorescent iceberg sculptures, glowing snow, abject penguins, sculpted underwater topography, and moving paper jellyfish. Heckman creates a space that demonstrates reverence for this threatened topography, but also captures something of the lens of fantasy through which she views it as a person who has never visited such a place, with a sense of distorted perspective in scale and heightened phenomena of color and light. The projected animated elements of this installation, rather than forming a single screened projection, will be used to create fleeting phenomena through the movement of light, swimming seals projected below glowing water, and miniature narratives throughout the space.

The iceberg sculptures in this installation are being created with the support of a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant through the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Read more about the development of this part of the project here.

Lorien Jordan, They Didn't Like Bach, 2008, pen and ink on paper, 20 x 20 inches

Exhibit details, spaces:
Love Letters to Antarctica is looking for spaces. The artists will work with exhibit spaces to create the necessary lighting systems and projections for these works to be viewed with alternating light and dark and the integration of 2- and 3-dimensional elements. If you’re interested in exhibiting this project or if you have a space in mind, please contact Annie Heckman at annieheckman@gmail.com or +1 847.977.3834.

View this post in its original location as a permanent page on the blog here.

Lorien Jordan, Long Walk Home, 2008, gouache on panel, 12 x 96 inches

Gentle readers, please forward this open call far and wide and contact me any time with questions. I’m honored to be coordinating this show together with Emmy Mathis, who went to the University of Illinois at Chicago with me back in the day and is now rocking out her MFA and other Miami-based pursuits at Florida International University.

OPEN CALL FOR FIBER BASED WORK

Edge Zones will be exhibiting a group fiber show in February, 2010, co-organized by artists Annie Heckman & Emmy Mathis.  If you have work that is fiber based and are interested in participating, please send images (with lots of details), a brief bio and statement to Emmy Mathis at emmymathis(at)gmail.com.

Images must be received by no later than October 1, 2009.  Any work that utilizes fibers will be considered.  For further information, please feel free to contact us:

Edge Zones: http://www.edgezones.org, edgezone(at)me.com,
Annie Heckman: annieheckman(at)gmail.com
Emmy Mathis: emmymathis(at)gmail.com

Edge Zones requests that work is submitted by Edge Zones members.  If you are not currently a member, please go to the gallery’s page on exhibitor’s requirements in order to become a member; membership requires a $25.00 fee as well as an application form.  Please also familiarize yourself with the information on this page when considering pieces to submit.

Edge Zones is an artist based non-profit founded in 2004 to research, conceptualize and execute events that strengthen the contemporary art environment among a diverse populations in Miami.