ANNIE HECKMAN

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!

————— Friday, June 11, 12-2pm —————>

Perhaps you’re up for an impromptu discussion of the influence of Catholic iconography on Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls epic, or a debate about Mike Kelley’s skewering of the military-industrial complex. Maybe you have a few burning questions about the significance of contemporary drawing as a medium. Or you may just be looking for an opportunity to talk to strangers at museums — here it is! This Friday I’m the featured artist for an informal, drop-in Water Cooler Talk with visitors to the galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

You can find me this Friday, June 11, from 12-2pm in the fourth floor lobby ready to talk about works on paper, flanked by a selection of works from the MCA’s Collection from Laylah Ali, Henry Darger, Peter Saul, Raymond Pettibon (the first time I learned art can be messy), Mike Kelley (second time), Karen Kilimnik, and Öyvind Fahlström. Coming up with ways to talk smart has never been so enjoyable — this is a great group of works.

When I think of water cooler talk I imagine gossip, updates, or information that you need to keep current. So I’m curious: what types of ideas, questions, and arguments have been coming up for you when you visit museums? Drop me a comment or a note, and please join me on Friday!

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.

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

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

This spring, after much anticipation, I was thrilled to be the recipient of a Community Arts Assistance Program Grant through the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Back in December (hence the much anticipation), I had proposed to create glow-in-the-dark iceberg sculptures as part of a surreal Antarctic installation project. This installation will eventually be exhibited alone and as part of a 2-person show, Love Letters to Antarctica, with the fantastic Lorien Jordan, whose works on paper based on uncanny accounts of Antarctic explorations have been inspiring me for almost a year.

It’s been rewarding and humbling for me to go through this process — to develop an idea, receive cash to push it to completion, and then move forward. The CAAP grant is forcing me to abandon some of my more amorphous work habits and to funnel my efforts in a specific order: think, draw, propose, budget, rework, shop, make, fix, shop, make, complete, document, exhibit. The ‘fix’ phase of that sequence has taken longer than I had expected, and I’ve gotten a chance to go back and school myself on some basic sculptural construction issues. So right now I’m in the elbow grease mode, and will cover the process in more detail here in the coming months.

For the time being, as I get ready for some more foam hacking and coating tomorrow, I’m going to study up with an amazing, childhood-harkening video of Cousteau in Antarctica.

Sometimes a project comes together so suddenly, with such amazing convergences and good circumstances, that I barely have time to process it. The Synesthetic Plan of Chicago is one of those.

Not too long ago, Daniel Godston invited me to come along with him to a meeting and kick around ideas about how to combine over 30 artists’ projects exploring multi-sensory experiences of Chicago’s neighborhoods in one space. A few sketches, proposals, and phone calls later, I find myself in the midst of a small movement of artists collaborating to make visual sense of sensory experiences in Chicago.

The result, an interactive installation made with amazing energy and support from artists and the benefactors listed below, is now on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, in the Visitor Information Center near the Randolph entrance.

Here are some preliminary photos from our installation days, and I’ll be adding more to the album shortly. If you’re in the Chicago area, please come check it out! The exhibit will be on view through September 30, but because of the interactive nature of the projects, you can expect new things to happen there on a regular basis. More on this soon.

I’m proud to mention that this project is presented in collaboration with Chicago cultural and neighborhood organizations, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago Office of Tourism and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Bureau of Tourism.

Spike and the Bunny, Part I, 2005

I just learned from the folks at the F.U.E.L. Collection in Philadelphia that Spike and the Bunny, Part I, an etching purchased from the Puppies are Biodegradable show, was recently donated to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I’m very pleased, especially since I’m a fan of children’s hospitals ever since Children’s Memorial in Chicago rearranged me properly back in the 80s. Check out the current projects at F.U.E.L here, and check back for updates on the submissions page. It’s an incredible space, a big former bank, and they’ve put together some amazing shows bringing exposure to new and emerging artists.

The announcement is ready, desiged by Shawn Stucky.

For a Limited Time Only
featuring Annie Heckman, Wendy Kveck, Marci Rubin, Shawn Stucky, and Jesse Witte
curated by Olga Stefan

Art Center Highland Park
1957 Sheridan Road
Highland Park, IL 60035
847.432.1888

March 6-29, 2009
Opening reception: March 6, 6:30-9:30 pm

There will be an edible catalog for this with an essay by Olga Stefan. I’m very curious to see how it’s done, and I might archive mine instead of eating it.
I hope you can join us, please bring friends, and send me a note if you have any questions or would like to be added to my mailing list.

Airline to Heaven, Part I will be on view at the Chicago Art Open this October. This is a huge group show put together by the Chicago Artists Coalition.
The 10th Annual Chicago Art Open will take place October 4 - 27, 2007 at Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron St., Chicago, IL 60609. Hours: 11am-5pm daily.

Curators for this year are:
Sabina Ott, Artist and Chair, Art and Design Department, Columbia College
Karen Irvine, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College
Linda Warren, Proprietor, Linda Warren Gallery

Opening Benefit of the Chicago Art Open
October 5, 2007
6pm-10pm
In keeping with the Chicago Artists’ Month theme of Creative Alliances, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition has invited the Old Town School of Folk Music to organize the entertainment for the Opening Benefit. Tickets are $20 per person and include food and drink. Available at the door.