Bio
CV
Statement
Artist Statement
My work reflects environmental concerns and addresses what we leave behind on this planet. Our planet is over-saturated with man-made products that cannot be recycled. Among those items are hundreds of vinyl advertising banners whose purpose ranges from attracting business, to marking celebrations, to publicizing events. After their use, they are usually thrown away, often finding their way to landfills. Each banner holds its own cultural history. I attempt to encapsulate the significance of the human footprint through the transformation of each banner into works of art that reveal a connection between consumption and environmental waste. These reclaimed billboard vinyls are message boards of societies, conjuring both time and place through a physical presence. Each banner is meticulously hand-cut which fractures the initial image disrupting the central intent of the printed information. Colors are sorted and brought together as weavings, collages or three-dimensional wall sculptures. As I construct the assorted pieces, images disintegrate into complex abstract shapes and complex color schemes transforming the final piece to a new narrative. I strive to harness the transformative power of art to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action.
CV
Statement
Artist Statement
My work reflects environmental concerns and addresses what we leave behind on this planet. Our planet is over-saturated with man-made products that cannot be recycled. Among those items are hundreds of vinyl advertising banners whose purpose ranges from attracting business, to marking celebrations, to publicizing events. After their use, they are usually thrown away, often finding their way to landfills. Each banner holds its own cultural history. I attempt to encapsulate the significance of the human footprint through the transformation of each banner into works of art that reveal a connection between consumption and environmental waste. These reclaimed billboard vinyls are message boards of societies, conjuring both time and place through a physical presence. Each banner is meticulously hand-cut which fractures the initial image disrupting the central intent of the printed information. Colors are sorted and brought together as weavings, collages or three-dimensional wall sculptures. As I construct the assorted pieces, images disintegrate into complex abstract shapes and complex color schemes transforming the final piece to a new narrative. I strive to harness the transformative power of art to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action.
Shelley Heffler- Charting Conditions in the Anthropocene
By Peter Frank
“…[T]he notion of place and location remains temporal and mutable,” writes Shelley Heffler, giving context to her engagement of maps – and the process of mapping – in her work. Like so many artists, Heffler has responded deeply to the aesthetic pleasures of cartography, and has made maps, mapping, and the qualities of charting ground and situation a central aspect of her work. Unlike so many artists – certainly painters – Heffler has taken up the making and the consideration of maps as much as a signal to the world as a celebration of it.
To be sure, many artists who engage maps are concerned, even preoccupied, with the declining condition of the terrestrial environment. For the most part, however, they employ maps as supportive documents, or at most icons of information – notational stand-ins for the real spaces they chart – so that the visual particulars of the maps presented recede into the presentation of information. Heffler, committed to painting and to a personalized, even internalized notion of abstraction, brings forward those particulars. Or, rather, she brings forward the condition of such particularity, making her work a place where her impulse to abstraction meets the factuality of cartography. Impulse and factuality both are bolstered in her art by the additional fact that the process of translating place and location to corresponding marks on a plane is itself a process of abstraction.
A crucial part of Heffler’s approach is to give heft and texture, not just line and color, to her invented maps. A good portion of her work – notably the “Altered Hybrid” paintings – consists as much of three-dimensional construction as it does of two-dimensional rendition. And even the physically flat paintings, most recently the “Maps of the Imagination” and ”Anthropocene Art,” infer a material presence as much off as on the canvas. The Anthropocene works conjure a vivid topography, as much by the cartography-like inscriptions Heffler has imposed on them as by the articulated grounds – mountainous or effluvial, according to the palette and the movement of pigment – at their base. The “Maps of the Imagination,” by contrast, strongly suggest urban densities, webbed as they are with lines inscribed as much according to underlying grids as to the flow of paint. The Anthropocene artworks infer the imprint humans make on the earth; the Maps of the Imagination infer the accretion of imprints humans make on themselves.
Shelley Heffler’s evocation of ecological unease is just that, an evocation. It asks us to look at what we are doing to our surroundings – and thus ourselves – by communicating through abstract gesture, however carefully calibrated, the depth and persistence of our insult. The agitation of Heffler’s painterly touch does not simply bespeak her own angst in the face of climate change, but brings to immediate awareness a sense of environmental degradation, almost as if that degradation were playing itself out on the canvas, before our eyes. By the same token, the gravity of Heffler’s work calls attention to the work itself as art; these paintings are graphically, coloristically, and texturally compelling as paintings, their coarse and furious beauty never far from the surface. It is, finally, the earth’s beauty shining through – and the matching beauty of hope, hope that humankind’s wisdom can overtake its profligacy.
May 2017
Aschaffenburg, Germany
By Peter Frank
“…[T]he notion of place and location remains temporal and mutable,” writes Shelley Heffler, giving context to her engagement of maps – and the process of mapping – in her work. Like so many artists, Heffler has responded deeply to the aesthetic pleasures of cartography, and has made maps, mapping, and the qualities of charting ground and situation a central aspect of her work. Unlike so many artists – certainly painters – Heffler has taken up the making and the consideration of maps as much as a signal to the world as a celebration of it.
To be sure, many artists who engage maps are concerned, even preoccupied, with the declining condition of the terrestrial environment. For the most part, however, they employ maps as supportive documents, or at most icons of information – notational stand-ins for the real spaces they chart – so that the visual particulars of the maps presented recede into the presentation of information. Heffler, committed to painting and to a personalized, even internalized notion of abstraction, brings forward those particulars. Or, rather, she brings forward the condition of such particularity, making her work a place where her impulse to abstraction meets the factuality of cartography. Impulse and factuality both are bolstered in her art by the additional fact that the process of translating place and location to corresponding marks on a plane is itself a process of abstraction.
A crucial part of Heffler’s approach is to give heft and texture, not just line and color, to her invented maps. A good portion of her work – notably the “Altered Hybrid” paintings – consists as much of three-dimensional construction as it does of two-dimensional rendition. And even the physically flat paintings, most recently the “Maps of the Imagination” and ”Anthropocene Art,” infer a material presence as much off as on the canvas. The Anthropocene works conjure a vivid topography, as much by the cartography-like inscriptions Heffler has imposed on them as by the articulated grounds – mountainous or effluvial, according to the palette and the movement of pigment – at their base. The “Maps of the Imagination,” by contrast, strongly suggest urban densities, webbed as they are with lines inscribed as much according to underlying grids as to the flow of paint. The Anthropocene artworks infer the imprint humans make on the earth; the Maps of the Imagination infer the accretion of imprints humans make on themselves.
Shelley Heffler’s evocation of ecological unease is just that, an evocation. It asks us to look at what we are doing to our surroundings – and thus ourselves – by communicating through abstract gesture, however carefully calibrated, the depth and persistence of our insult. The agitation of Heffler’s painterly touch does not simply bespeak her own angst in the face of climate change, but brings to immediate awareness a sense of environmental degradation, almost as if that degradation were playing itself out on the canvas, before our eyes. By the same token, the gravity of Heffler’s work calls attention to the work itself as art; these paintings are graphically, coloristically, and texturally compelling as paintings, their coarse and furious beauty never far from the surface. It is, finally, the earth’s beauty shining through – and the matching beauty of hope, hope that humankind’s wisdom can overtake its profligacy.
May 2017
Aschaffenburg, Germany