Jenny Heishman is from Florida. She lives on Bainbridge Island now (and has been in Seattle for several years), which is a different manner of beach entirely. The aesthetics of Florida and Seattle are as opposing as their positions in the country. And Florida and Seattle extend two very different propositions about land and nature and color and how to live—each with its own built-in fantasies.
As an artist, Heishman takes the irreconcilable contradictions of these places and makes them jostle and overlap, in sculptures and paintings that feel super-contemporary and relevant despite their unapologetic obscurity. Her visual cues are things that are already embedded in your mind’s eye, but that don’t hold an honored place: the primary-colored striped blanket that lives in your trunk in case you decide to go to the beach, the awful high-tone-mimicry architecture of the mini-mall shoppes in a place like Madison Park.
Once, back when she was still showing at the now-defunct Howard House, Heishman did an entire, slick series inspired by golf courses. At the Olympic Sculpture Park last summer, she showed a cheerful green-and-white-striped awning mounted on a concrete retaining wall, chipperly advertising nothing—reminding you of the ice-cream-stand culture that’s missing from Seattle’s rocky waterfront, where amateur zoologists roam instead. Yet her version of a Mount Rainier landscape is unlike anything glossy or Floridian, and unlike the cutesiness of a place like Bainbridge. The sculpture is a pile of stuff—a gray-and-white blob of cast paint, smooth at the bottom and cratery on top, framed by a piece of plum paper topped with a tiny yellow triangle—all balancing on a skinny shelf bracket, which she screwed to the wall of someone’s apartment in a one-night-only show. Her work is where obscurity and nouveau riche unapologetically meet.
Her new show at Prole Drift, Prop Shop, is one room plus a long chamber that’s empty except for a pair of paintings on the far wall. In the front room, there are several objects that relate both to the wall and the floor. You first see five baskets made of aluminum foil: three sitting on the floor, one higher up on a naked milk crate, and a fifth one still higher—as if they were forming some kind of apotheosis—on an invisible shelf covered by a drop cloth spray-painted the colors of a tropical sunset. The drop cloth is tacked loosely to the wall above, so one of its sides falls onto the basket.
There’s so much wrong with these baskets. Calling them baskets is a stretch of a noun. (This is where Heishman always gets me, on this low-lying level of noun-gone-wrong.) There’s a crisscrossing pattern on them. But that’s a reference to weaving, and these things are just foil. It’s crinkly from having been shaped and reshaped. What’s great is, foil shows its cards. Its past is on the surface—you can’t really erase foil back to its original state—and its future’s up in the air. These empty foil vessels could be crushed by a small dog.
At the show’s opening, I found myself going down the rabbit hole of these baskets, looking at them forever. I had to pull the artist aside. She explained that she applied the patterns in the form of crisscrossing colored tape when the foil was still flat and lying in sheets, before she shaped it. She said she studied Japanese ceramics back in the day, and that if you shape the edges of a piece so it casts a sizable shadow, it will look heavy, like it has a life of its own. All this, in foil and a milk crate and drop cloth.
But, okay, this is Prop Shop. It’s backstage? Onstage? What distortions come from just being looked at from varying distances? Props are less or more real than what they represent. Onstage, you have to project in weird, broad ways to seem natural from a distance; you have to do things that would seem unnatural up close. Mimicry is complicated business. Turf, for instance, makes grass look natural, native—when both, like these baskets, are unnatural constructs. Props.
Across the room, there’s a series of Xeroxed photographs of works-in-progress deposited inside two pieces of found furniture. Standing next to them, I realize that with minimum intellectual contortion, I could probably find a way to find this interesting—but the object doesn’t give me the fuel. Sometimes Heishman’s unapologetic obscurity works, sometimes not. Somehow that doesn’t diminish the excitement of her shows. (Her work is mysteriously trustworthy over time. This year, she was shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award and was the winner of Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award.)
The paintings in the back room are older, and I’m not entirely sure they’re really part of Prop Shop, segregated with only the company of their lights. They are watercolor on paper. Each portrays a ghost, sort of—a piece of fabric draped over an unseen structure that causes the fabric to bend and fold in on itself in complicated ways. The paintings are only a collection of bright, beach-ball-colored stripes on white paper; there are no outlines of the fabrics to guide you in the illusion, the way a blanket would have edges in a photograph. And yet Heishman has taken care to make sure that the stripes drape “true”—that you can follow a red stripe over here and see how it would fall there. Giving herself immunity from borders, Heishman yet stays faithful to her ghost of fabric. Was an actual blanket ever in front of her in the first place? It’s halfway gone now, the white half just a series of hovering blanks. Every great Heishman is a self-contained ghost of mimicry. 
Overwrought, unoriginal, and tired. When DOES this schtick end? It’s just like one big clutter f#*k of unoriginality and derivation.
And for the record, you are making this even worse than it already is…
“Mini mall shoppes(as in ye olde?)…where obscurity and nouveau riche meet… mysteriously trustworthy,,, drape “true”…ghost of mimicry”…it flows out of you just like that green goop gushes out of the undead when vanquished-just like in all those horror films we’ve been seeing on TV this week-only you make sure it’s coated in lots of white sugar, ugh, I feel a diabetic art coma coming on…
Just saw the show and loved it, especially the work in the photo above. I too was especially taken with the chunky weight and unbearable lightness of the baskets.
susanna bluhm
artangel, I’m thinking you’re nwmystic and Highbrowgorilla all rolled into one. What a cute little troll you are and a master of taste. You seem a little sick given what your job requires of you. Poor thing.
@1 As much as I tend to agree with you, you’re treading on my territory-don’t ya think?
@ G f-Hole. I think you should expand your thinking and realize that not everybody is drinking the Kool Aid in this town. Many do not agree with y’all.
artangel, why always the critique of the writer? that is getting tired. please tell us what you like or don’t like about the art. it’s a review!
I’ve seen this show a few times now, and I get more from it with each visit. Heishman has a way with materials that sneaks up on you. This work isn’t handed to the viewer on a platter all pre-chewed and pre-digested – Heishman is aiming for a more engaged audience, people who are willing to slow down and actually look. Take a moment to roll each object around in your mind like a marble you found on the sidewalk when you were a kid. You will definitely find a treat inside the experience.
[artangel: you sound like an angry artist who is feeling jilted by the art world. Going around with your eyes wide shut and mouth wide open crying like a little baby isn’t going to help – in fact it’s probably at the heart of the problem with your own art work. Best of luck with that!]
To the usual suspects:
It’s just a free gift for you. sure, the bullshit detector goes off a lot for everyone when viewing contemporary art. but being an asshole doesn’t do anyone any good. make yourself a place where you can actually offer something.
@a, @4, @5 (artangel, northwest mystic, highbrowgorilla, etc. (all the same dude))
Dear Multiperson (northwest mystic, artangel) HO,
Your deluded craft is obvious and only fools you. You are not e pluribus unum. You are one. You are many from one. You are clearly one not many. Your name may change but your signature style stands out like a sore conundrum or an too often reused condom. That you, artangel, would log on as (we know who you are) northwest mystic, and claim you’re not artangel is such a cute hale Mary act of subterfuge. I do admit I find some interest in your game. But you appear in so many guises on so many Stranger blogs and comment opportunities. You even appear elsewhere. You busy little devil, you. You despise pop notions and light commentary. You think you are the ultimate unleashed. I’m sure many psychiatrists would try to help your condition with pills. Some call you an unwelcome troll. I’m thinking you are entertaining to a wee degree. So you have some micro-value. Kind of like an errant gnat in a huge universe of commonsense chaos. Then there’s those who follow and think the proper progressive stance towards you is to show you progressive love and appeal to your possible inner-goodness. They fail on the petard of a particular kind of liberal ignorance. Nothing would seem to have the power to help you but perhaps a good old fashion frontal lobotomy. You are not the only churl and that is a problem for many. Your dementia praecox glows in the dark. Your ways of grandiosity is a warning sign you must be blind to. Should we hope for your salvation, Insha’Allah? You seem to be destined to contribute to THE NOISE of life. So clever but so bankrupt. You strange ho to nonsense.
@a, @4, @5 – you do know that several of us at The Stranger know your name, address and other neat things, no? Oh wait, you didn’t go to ITT tech. Watch it.
@10 hmmm…last time i checked, this was a commentary and opinion forum for ALL POV’s According to my attorney-free speech and privacy is protected in this country. Also hacking into databases and websites etc is a felony. If you know things from illegal activity, well, that’s cause for a little more investigating and what you choose to threaten me with..maybe you should watch it. If miss graves cant take criticism, maybe a new career is in order. This isnt high school and roughing me up at recess is hardly, never mind “feelingshy”.
The objects keep turning over and over in my mind. The cut burlap painting reminded me of a T-rex skull, or was it a ship cockpit with purple neon? The fragile foil vessels are very carefully decorated and perfectly imperfect. your kool-aid is refreshing, laced with vitamin c and good intentions. Thank you!
“Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” -Alan Watts
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”~Voltaire
I like that Heishman’s work nods to seminal artists who’s work is provocative/transgressive. She uses that same alphabet to find things that are kind, witty and extremely complex– a welcome sort of refinement that is a serum to billboard tropes.
Prop Shop is initially crummy and hermetic, but it’s contrived in the best way: The work is intimate, open, and generous with visual clues that can take you anywhere. It’s a vague area balanced between many territories like a fractal vestibule.
If only you’d take the time…come along if you care.