Along A Line
Along A Line
Along A Line
HEATHER THERESA CLARK
APRIL 7 - MAY 12, 2018
HAMILTONIAN GALLERY
RESOURCE > WASHINGTON DC
Utilizing her expertise as a planner, green developer, and ecologist, Heather Theresa Clark merges the natural, domestic and the industrial in Along A Line. An outgrowth of her interest in how environmental crisis affects us personally, and amplifies inequities, Clark’s newest project is comprised of works that take their visual cues from the aesthetics of success as it is performed in the public and private sphere; namely, monuments and aspirational homes. Working in symbolically loaded materials such as military parachutes, marble laminate, beeswax and rawhide, Clark alludes to the aesthetics of Western success while simultaneously forcing them into a state of crisis. In Along A Line, entropy is king: monuments are depicted in a state of decay, and the walls of a house are being forced together on a collision course.
Clark’s lyrical interpretation of the environmental crisis, and our powerlessness and reliance on the fossil fuel economy, takes the form of a massive kinetic sculpture titled Sides of A Line. Comprised of two walls covered in parachutes and beeswax that slowly inch towards one another along a track, Sides of A Line is the artist’s interpretation of the relationship between oppositional forces: domestic space and global environments, organic materials and manufactured realities, personal identity and nature. Running the length of the piece is a tightrope, which draws a tenuous, taught and piercing line through the installation, alluding to the absence of and threat to a body. Embedded within the installation are small signals of hope: references to nature, biophilia, and biomimicry, which provide alternative patterns for living; and the sensuality of the work, which invites us to engage with our bodies. Also on view are images created with Gretjen Helene and Scott Jansson of DISSONANCE, the performance Clark presented on a barge at sea, while she was artist-in-residence at Woods Hole Research Center, a leading climate change think tank.
Heather Theresa Clark (b. 1978, Boston, MA) utilizes art, architecture, and public interventions to catalyze built environments that power themselves, cleanse themselves, transform waste, provide wildlife habitat, produce food, and enhance the lives of people. She holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, summa cum laude, in Environmental Science and Community Planning, a self-designed major. As founder of Biome Studio, she has transformed a burned building shell into an open- air theater with a living sculpture; co-created the Busycle, a 15 person-pedal powered bus; overseen the largest deep energy retrofit in the U.S.; converted historic mills into green low-income housing; and installed over one megawatt of solar pv on 2,300 low-income apartments. Heather is also an activist. Heather is the founder of the Play-In for Climate Action, a family-oriented climate change protest held annually at the US Capitol by Moms Clean Air Force, a special project of the Environmental Defense Fund. Heather is the 2016 recipient of the Virginia Commission for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship Award and the 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Woods Hole Research Center, the leading global climate change think tank.
Hamiltonian Gallery
1353 U Street NW Suite 101
Washington, DC 20009
www.hamitoniangallery.com
Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 6:00 pm,or by appointment.
t: 202.332.1116
e: info@hamiltonianartists.org
All images courtesy Hamiltonian.
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