Cooperstown, NY
Residency: January-February 2012
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“I cut, wrap, draw, knot, twist and paint”. Family estrangement, personal tragedy and political outrage intersect for Christine Heller. Both painter and installation artist, Heller sees her installations as performance. She explores family and societal denial, she paints faces – from family albums and news photographs- and she draws bodies. She cuts life-sized figures from muslin fabric, that suggests shells, souls and shrouds, and she entwines wire and fence throughout her installations. “I want to convey unspoken complications in human relationships.”
Heller has exhibited in numerous one-person shows, including at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, Wells College, Aurora, NY, the Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, NY, the Munson-Williams-Proctor School of Art, Utica, NY. Heller’s work was represented by the John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY from 2008 – 2011.
Group exhibition highlights include the Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY, the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, the Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, NY, and Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY.
Heller was awarded a University Fellowship from the Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA where she received her MFA in 1981. She has taught at Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, NY, the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore MD and in the Vermont College Graduate Program of Norwich University, Montpelier, VT. She has received a fellowship at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. Heller was awarded the 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts MARK 11 Professional Development Program.
2×2 Collective
Christine Heller is a member of the recently formed 2×2 collective, four artists who met through NYFA’s MARK program. The collective finds common ground in their disparate uses of the figure at intersections of the social/political/personal.
They create objects, interactive and sculptural installations, video, and street performances. Their figures have agency, empower viewers as centers of process and experience, and co-opt them as complicit participants. We complicate and push against dichotomies and hierarchies: self/other, perpetrator/victim, rural/urban, black/white, family/stranger, performer/observer.
Project Statement
At Sculpture Space, 2X2 is developing a collaborative installation for Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, which we will install immediately following our residency. The show will run from March 10th to April 14th, 2012. (http://www.aferro.org)
