Heather Mekkelson: Debris Fields
Opening Reception: Friday, January 18, 6-9:00 PM
On Display: January 18-February 16, 2008
Artist Talk: January 24, 6-9:00 PM
Debris Field is a part of a series of sculptural work that similarly bleeds into awareness. Working with images from public disasters, Heather Mekkelson catalogs and reconstructs the fragments, "composing" ruins from hand-crafted debris within the framework of art historical, Romantic catastrophes like Gericault's Scene of the Deluge (1818) and Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819). Mekkelson's Debris Fields are eerie stages set with the mundane, stripped of its value beyond that of index. For Mekkelson, the study of ruins is a deconstruction of psychological and physical permanency, but for the viewer, taking in the idea of catastrophe as neatly registered landscape, reads as an unsettling bellwether. As Mekkelson notes herself: "recent disasters [provide] a window through which we can foresee [our] world in ruins;" Debris Field's fabrication provides perspective, disaster and catastrophe might be of our own manufacture.
Heather Mekkelson is a current MFA candidate at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been featured in Chicago exhibitions at Standard (solo), Gallery 400, 40000, GARDENfresh, The Green Lantern and The Pond. She was included in the inaugural exhibition, 41/90: Contemporary Landscape at The Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA) with accompanying catalog. Mekkelson's Debris Field project will be accompanied by an essay by art historian and critic Lane Relyea in a forthcoming issue of Art Journal. She was nominated for a Driehaus award in 2006.
Links:
Mekkelson's Interview with Adam Grossi
Mekkelson at Old Gold in NewCity.com
Mekkelson's Article on Bertran Projects
