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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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

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, 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

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