HEATHER GUERTIN
Heand

January 11 – February 15, 2014

INTERSTATE is pleased to present Heather Guertin’s first solo exhibition in New York, Heand.

The following is an excerpt from the exhibition’s catalog essay Look and Look Some More by Jamie Sterns.

...The first thing you see is the color. The palates are specific and varied but share a quality of light. There are hues that compliment, dissolve, heighten and erase. There are shapes, squares, swirls, and areas of fade that remind you of a room or a field or a curtain, someplace indistinct yet familiar somehow. Then there are these people. These faces in profile, some with eyes, most blank, some in three quarter turn. You know it’s a face somehow even though you are given only the slightest cues. Then there are these bodies, these limbs and feet and most importantly there are these hands. They are flicked out or directed in such a way that you can feel the mood lingering in the air or a question waiting for reply.

These figures in these colorscapes are not built into the paintings. They do not inhabit the space that surrounds them. Instead, they are carved out from the paint with a knife-like swiftness. These faces, bodies, and hands make you think of stories. They make you imagine that the colors, the opacity and lightness of the surface are more then just pigment. Each brush stroke becomes something. Each color means something. They create traces and these traces lead you to a story. The story is loose, it is yours as you imagine it but there is enough suggestion in what is painted to nudge at your thoughts.

Heather Guertin creates figures that are in a state of becoming and you can see this in how the oil paint creates movement and energy. The tenuousness of their creation is suggestive of the conflict of the human condition and the ways in which it is unsteady and impermanent. These works are visualized attempts to becoming realized in the body and self in a universal way. The paintings are not an autobiography or a stand in for one, it is not about her, Heather, it is about how this is what we all face; trying to achieve self realization without having all the parts, answers, or even knowing the right questions to ask.

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Heather Guertin was recently included in a three person exhibition at Thomas Duncan Gallery in Los Angeles and performed in conjunction with the Carnegie International. Her work has been exhibited in New York at Interstate Projects in conjunction with 247365, Jack Hanley Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Bortolomi, Harris Lieberman and Lisa Cooley, and at Young Art in Los Angeles. She will be included in upcoming exhibitions at Malraux’s Place in Brooklyn and Brand New Gallery in Milan. Heather Guertin received her Masters degree at the Art Institute of Chicago. Last year she published a novella titled Model Turned Comedian. She is currently working on her second book Not Yet Titled, Cambodia.

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PRESS FOR EXHIBITION:

Art in America Interview: Verbatim: Heather Guertin

~Exhibition catalog available