ANNIE HECKMAN

I had a great studio visit with Darrell Roberts yesterday (who has an upcoming solo show at Thomas McCormick Gallery in Chicago opening next week). The coolest part of looking at the in-progress bone piece with Darrell was watching him arrange the pieces and getting a sense of how someone might approach them to build out of them. This was in my studio away from home, in East Garfield Park, where it’s easier to stage things and set up installations. Meanwhile the factory — painting both sides of the paper pieces with phosphorescent paint — continues:

in progress - painting the cut-outs

I also got a chance to visit The Art Center in Highland Park this week. Their space is huge and I’m working on plans for how to best build an enclosure so the piece can be viewed in the dark/light cycle it needs to glow and recharge.

This week there are a few talks I’ll be excitedly attending here in Chicago. First, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (where I love being an Artist Guide for school tours), Sarah Sze is giving a talk tomorrow, Tuesday, January 27, at 6 pm. Click here to check out the event and order tickets. Her installation on the fourth floor is awesome for tours — imagine the fun of showing a group of kids that art can be made out of inexpensive everyday objects.

On Thursday, January 29, I’m headed over to threewalls to visit Christa Donner’s show Re:Production again and to hear her artist talk at 6 pm. threewalls will also soon be carrying all the StepSister Press books in the beautiful bookshop there.

While on the topic of StepSister Press, I’m actually really excited about the new contributions on our blog from arts writer Alicia Eler. Her idea for the next post is pretty amazing (think: D.C. fever that can last for several weeks, or maybe even eight years) so I’ll be checking it regularly.

This was a great moment today — After dutifully checking my Google Alerts I found that my upcoming installation project was featured on the Ponoko Blog by industrial designer Duann Scott. The site is a showcase for individualized goods, with a focus on different types of innovative manufacturing. Check it out - there have been a lot of cool projects posted recently on the blog - and drop off a comment on the post.

Annie Heckman, You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time (in progress), 2008

Here’s our initial press release for the show coming up in March. Please forward widely and get in touch if you have any questions about the show or the work!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

What:
For a Limited Time Only, exhibition featuring 5 emerging artists, of whom 3 are Chicago-based.  Curated by Olga Stefan.

Who:
Artists: Annie Heckman, Marci Rubin, Jess Witte, Shawn Stucky and Wendy Kveck.

Where:
The Art Center Highland Park
1957 Sheridan Road
Highland Park, IL 60035
phone: (847) 432-1888
fax: (847) 432-9106
Our Winter Hours:
Mon-Fri: 9:00am-4:00pm
Sat: 9:00am-3:00pm

When:
March 6-March 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 6:30-9pm
Wine and appetizers will be served.

About the exhibition:
For a Limited Time Only explores the ephemeral nature of art, and by extension, humanity’s imprint and the artist’s mark, through works that will exist only for the extent of the exhibition.  The projects deteriorate, or even disintegrate completely, during the course of the show. For a Limited Time Only concentrates on the urgency of the work, and encourages the artists, as well as audiences, to consider these projects philosophically, focusing primarily on the idea of the work as temporary experience rather than artistic mark, and memory rather than document.

Catalogue printed on wafer paper with edible inks will, with essay by Olga Stefan, and design by Shawn Stucky, will be distributed at the opening.  In keeping with the concept of the exhibit, guests are requested to dispose of and/or consume the catalogue upon reading.

About the artists:
Annie Heckman is an artist based in Chicago.  Her work explores mortality and afterlife ideologies through sculptural animation installations and works on paper. She has shown her work in numerous spaces, including exhibitions in Chicago, New York City, and Budapest. She is the founder of StepSister Press.

Marci Rubin is a Chicago-based sculptor and printmaker.  Her work focuses on transformations through process and materials.  Marci has exhibited throughout the city and has received her MFA from the University of Chicago.  Her work can be seen at Framing Mode, a business that she manages and owns.

Wendy Kveck is a multi-media artist living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada, but has shown throughout the country, and in Chicago.  Wendy received her MFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her BFA in Painting from The University of Iowa, Iowa City.  Her work focuses on women’s role in society and humanity’s obsession with consumption.

Shawn Stucky is a Chicago-based printmaker.  His work makes a strong bond among music, feelings, and experiences in life. For Shawn, music can create feelings that he cannot manage to put into words, but feels compelled to create art that gives those feelings a tangible form.  Shawn has exhibited at Around The Coyote, the Chicago Art Open, and other venues throughout the city.

Jess Witte is a St. Louis based artist, originating from Illinois, where she received her MFA from Northern Illinois University.  Her work has been exhibited throughout the Midwest at museums and art organizations.  Jess has worked in arts administration for many years and is currently the gallery assistant for the Pulitzer Foundation Art Gallery in St. Louis.

About the curator:
Olga Stefan was the executive director of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, from 2005-2008 and the executive director of Around the Coyote from 1998-2003.  From 2003-2005, Olga was the grant writer for Woman Made Gallery.  She has curated several exhibitions, including an international show, “Palpable Disequilibrium: Contemporary Art in Romania” at the gallery of Barat College and LIPA Gallery in Chicago, “Resurrection” at Yello Gallery and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, “Please Print” and many others at ATC Space.  She has also served as juror for several festivals, shows, and granting agencies.  Olga currently resides in Zurich, Switzerland.

Today these showed up in the mail (and now everyone at the UPS Store knows what a creep I am, because I pulled open the box and started rubbing my hands together with glee and mumbling ‘efficiency!’). The yellow coloring you see on the edges of these cut pieces is a light burn mark made during the cut when the laser hits the edge of the paper. Here they’re stacked and wrapped in plastic; to give you an idea of how thick they are, the humerus pieces you see on their sides make up a stack of about 40.

stacks of paper cut-outs

And then there was kitten involvement when I went to take them out of the box at home. Behold Spanky:

Spanky investigating

This is why, no matter what, I need to keep up my studio away from the apartment. The kittens get a lot of satisfaction out of destroying stuff like this, no matter how many toys are on the floor for them.

Some time back in October, I decided to start an installation project involving paper cut-out, glow-in-the-dark, hand-drawn bones. Lots of them. Inspired by Olga Stefan’s curatorial approach to For a Limited Time Only (an upcoming show at The Art Center in Highland Park featuring the installation), I wanted to make a structure that would start out as an intricate web of interlocking parts, but then break down over the course of the show. I also wanted to make use of the time decay of glow-in-the-dark paint, and white glow-in-the-dark paint has a particularly short glow time (about twenty minutes, compared to several hours for some of the stronger phosphorescent colors like green). I decided to move forward with a house-of-cards structure made up of drawn paper human and animal bones. An early incarnation of this project, with only the most basic bones, is below. Any macabre fans of the European bone churches, such as the Ossuary in the Czech Republic and the Capuchin Chapel in Rome, will find the overall structure familiar. These tremendously sad, hallucinatory burial grounds have been a long fascination of mine since I saw the Capuchin Chapel during a visit to Rome in 2003. The whole installation is, in its own odd way, a tribute to my brother. It’s perhaps a bit of a sick tribute, but given his support of my projects, I think he would have appreciated the gesture made as part of a lesson in mortality from his loss.

Annie Heckman, You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time (in progress, darkened view), 2008, paper, graphite, phosphorescent paint, dimensions variable

When I was planning all this out, with such rich enthusiasm, I started by approaching the mechanics of the house-of-cards structure, taking a lesson from the famous cardstacker Bryan Berg in his excellent and weirdly meditative book. I learned that I would need a thick, rough paper for the bones to stand up and rest on each other without slipping, and I found that my best bet was a 300 lb. cold press Arches paper. Then I started making bone stencils, then tracing, cutting, priming several times with glow-in-the-dark paint, drawing on the shadows and lines with graphite, and then painting in highlights in glow-in-the-dark paint again. The process is pretty spectacular, and when my cats get involved it’s beyond weird.

This went on for a while. Then my hands got tired. Chopping through 300 lb. paper is no small task, and I eventually decided to do the right thing and have these bones laser cut. This changed the whole project from a stencil process to a getting-things-done-in-Illustrator project. Below is a cropped example of one of the layouts I’ve used. I’ll get my first shipment of bones from the laser cutter tomorrow. Technology is beautiful.

Annie Heckman, bone layout, process photo

Would any of the many other artists out there making work related to the skeletal system like to talk about a bone show? Leave me comments and links below if you’re interested.

Over a year ago, when I was curating the show Moving Through Medium (six emerging artists animate for the first time) at the Moreau Art Galleries, I was fortunate to work with artist Bridget Riversmith in a sort of whirlwind pre-exhibit animation residency. Armed with a soundtrack courtesy of Bill Reichelt and Cheer Up Poems, Bridget left her home and studio in Duluth, Minnesota to join me for two weeks in Chicago. Her process was rigorous and inventive, and it was an honor to work with her.

I was looking over Bridget’s fantastic website the other day when I came across this page devoted to the animation. Here Bridget outlines sections describing the piece: synopsis, credits, technique, stills, director biography, festivals, and reviews. With detailed notes on the production of the piece (including an original storyboard image), she brought me so much into the process of making her work that I started having substantially sharpened memories of our summer residency.

(Visit the great Lisa Leighton’s site to see the original image we used in our announcement above.)

Right Ascension: 5h46m32s Declination: -32d34'25" photo Christina Heckman

Recently a friend of our family named a star after my brother, Stephen Heckman. I had heard about this service before, but I didn’t expect a star to be named for Steve and hadn’t predicted how amazing it would feel to imagine a memorial in the sky. It’s possible to pull up photos of the stars, including ways to set the coordinates, through Google Sky. Shown here is a photo taken from the computer screen by my sister, Christina Heckman.