ANNIE HECKMAN

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.

————

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.

Annie Heckman, You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time, 2009, phosphorescent paint and graphite on paper, dimensions variable

Kathryn Born is someone I know from the world of books and articles, from her one line poems and art reviews. So it makes sense that her curatorial project at Refuge: Center for Artists in Recovery is organized around the idea of communication and its various capacities for overload, including Kathryn’s own text-based wall installation that sprawls energetically throughout the main gallery. The show’s title, Communication is Overrated, is culled from Kathryn’s store of poetry. It was a pleasure to have my skeletal glow-in-the-dark installation included in this exhibit, and it will be even more gratifying to see it in the context of tomorrow’s opening.

A little background on this space, where I’m particularly honored to show my work: Refuge, as its name indicates, is a center for artists in recovery from addiction, emotional disorders, and trauma, as well as for artists who support the work of friends and family in recovery. Yes, it has been mentioned that this mission potentially includes just about everyone, with that important distinction that it really includes anyone who decides to take on that position of support—support for the process of recovery and for the goal of building an art practice, two mutually beneficial paths in life. So actually, not everyone. But we are all excited to meet each other and to draw others into this mindset.

Bill Current, the executive director, founded the space in 2006 to serve as a meeting point for this support, an overlap of recovery and the arts, and to serve as a bridge between artists in recovery and a broader public. Spend ten minutes with Bill and you will want him to found another one of these in your neighborhood too; this is the probably the warmest space where art has ever been installed.

The theme of this exhibit, communication, is intertwined with the mission of the space. As anyone familiar with recovery programs will know, communication is an integral part of building a support system for healing. Refuge’s mission even states that “art is a catalyst to communicate the success of recovery from the barriers of addiction or mental, physical, and emotional challenges.” So if communication is at the heart of this process, why are we saying it’s overrated?

Kathryn’s statement about the project captures something of this contradiction:

This exhibit plays with the power and limitation of communication, deconstructs the act of the message. It explores the means we use to convey the message about who we really are, and the way the basic truth of our lives is something we can never really explain.

Honesty, making amends, and telling your story are supposed to be such a huge part of healthy transitions; this exhibit plays compellingly with the question of how much knowledge we can really get about each other through communication, that whole matter of how much information is too much, and whether there can ever be enough information for us to really know each other. As a fan of excessive, gritty, embarrassing honesty, along with its many philosophical and psychological limit regions, I’m excited to be included in the conversation.

If you’re reading this in the Chicago area, please join us!
Communication is Overrated
curated by Kathryn Born
featuring Annie Heckman, Robert Buchholz, Carol Lewis, Diane Green, Dina, Emily Calvo, Joy Appenzeller Bauer, Kathryn Born, Mark Oldach, & Michael Imlay

April 24 – June 19, 2009
Opening: Friday, May 1, 7-10 pm
Refuge: Center for Artists in Recovery
4811 Main Street, Suite 100
Skokie, IL 60077
phone +1 847.673.3737
–>Map it–> 

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Friday: 11:00 am to 5:30 pm
Saturday: 11:00 am to 2:00 pm

You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time (detail), 2009, paper, graphite, phosphorescent paint, dimensions variable, installed at The Art Center Highland Park

For a Limited Time Only opened on Friday to a huge crowd at The Art Center. It was a lively event and we’re grateful to everyone who came to check out the show. Kathryn Born has written a great piece about the exhibit for ArtSlant, “Art Is Not Eternal.” You’ll see work from the other artists in the show on that site; they were a dream to work with, and it’s also time for another shout out to our curator Olga Stefan for bringing us all together.

My piece evolved to include a wall installation on the outside of the enclosure, signaling its contents to viewers. This came up following a suggestion from the gallery director and really improved the way the work sat in the space; without the wall piece the enclosure, a light-controlled gallery-within-a-gallery, had the potential to look deceptively like a sort of un-enterable boxy sculpture. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these wall pieces; in this one the various parts are all balanced on pins or on one another, with no adhesive and no pins actually tacking them down. Here’s an image:

You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time (exterior view), 2009, paper, graphite, phosphorescent paint, dimensions variable, installed at The Art Center Highland Park

Now that the work is in place I’m going through photos of the project and moving on to make a few drawings (on flat, rectangular paper — no bone shapes) in the vein of the Becoming Formless project (think: maggots). That animation is on its way to a few upcoming shows in New York and New Jersey — updates soon!