Wendy Heldmann.
Wendy Heldmann's vividly empty paintings of recently ruined buildings and desolate sites have something in common with her previous series of toppled, anonymous furniture, sideways boxes and storage cupboards piled up with unidentifiable rubbish - they both sustain moments which in real life are only supposed to be transitory states - the torn asunder aftermath of a natural disaster, or of a break-in - observing what remains and how it can be approached differently if even for a second it is allowed to remain intact and not be fixed or re-ordered. Whereas other artists focus on the act of explosion and destruction itself, Heldmann makes constant reminders of the aftermath and its seduction.
Somehow, despite the potential human horror connoted by their theme, the disaster paintings are particularly beautiful, their slightly gnomic titles ('I don't know more now than you did then', 'If we met would you know me', 'Little by little and then not even that') suggestive of multiple narratives apart from their thudding subject matter. Their take on loss is a big step away from a detail-obsessed surveyor's portfolio (though it was their archipictorial detail and precise colouring that originally drew me in), like the kind of work you might expect a very melancholy insider to the building trade to make, not a record-keeper. The story of our relationship with ruins is a long one, equally to do with a need for romanticizing the past as well as the desire to ignore the same ruins' reflection of the present, or even the future.
Heldmann, an LA-based painter, originally trained in engineering at Cornell and the Technical University in Hamburg but later went on to study fine art in San Francisco and Goldsmiths. Her work expresses an unashamed consciousness for the sinking passing of time, symbolic postcards collecting a more fragile, disposable view of the built environment and the metaphors that accompany it, looking more prop-like, test-ground-ish and purposely-unbuilt than we are used to seeing.
If you missed her solo show in late spring at sixspace in LA, catch her work in two current shows, 'Time writers from the mirror horizon', curated by Gabie Strong, at David Patton Los Angeles (7 July - 4 Aug 2007) and 'The atrocity exhibition', still at Thierry Goldberg in New York, til 28 July. You can also buy one of Heldmann's works, her lingering 'Traveling dream', from LA's Sixspace Gallery for $27. (or you can watch an excerpt of it here).
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
Wendy Heldmann's site
'TIME WRITERS FROM THE MIRROR HORIZON'
Featuring Andy Alexander, Kent Familton, Wendy Heldmann, Kathleen Johnson, Alice Konitz, Tracy Nakayama, Gina Osterloh, Kristine Thompson and Jeremy Yoder, curated by Gabie Strong.
7 July - 4 Aug 2007
David Patton Los Angeles
5006 1/2 York Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90042
T: +1 323 478 1966
'THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION'
Featuring Ahmed Alsoudani, Ben Grasso, Wendy Heldmann, and Molly Larkey
To 28 July 2007
Thierry Goldberg Projects
5 Rivington Street
New York, NY 10002
T: +1 212 967 2260
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