Thom Heileson Gallery 4 Culture
506 Second Ave,
Smith Tower, Suite 200,
296-8674.
I’ve always found it difficult not to read the exhibitions at Gallery 4 Culture against the space itself and the building the gallery is housed in. As Seattle’s first skyscraper and the fourth tallest building in the world at the time it was built in 1914, the Smith Tower’s odd history lends itself to contemplation in a way that, say, the Bank of America Tower (where the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs’ City Space Gallery resides) never will. Built by rifle and typewriter magnate Lyman C. Smith, the Smith Tower anticipated a future Seattle to rival that of Manhattan. While Site map doesn’t address the Smith Tower’s history or even reference the building itself, photographer Thom Heileson’s subject matter offers a way to think about Smith’s initial ambitions and the progressive/regressive nature of urban development.
Heileson’s primary subject matter is landscapes in the broadest sense of the word: interior and exterior, industrial and natural, real and imagined. He documents urban structures on the cusp of disintegration and industrial relics, basically the skeletal remains of progress. His working method makes for completely inaccurate representations, though. Heileson uses antiquated cameras for the initial shot, letting light bleed in and other accidents affect the film. From there, the image is transferred to digital, and technical glitches further add to or detract from the picture. The resulting image isn’t necessarily abstracted, although it’s nice to see that a couple of the pieces are heading more in this direction (Fuse and Control Tower), indicating that Heileson is growing more comfortable with his process. What would frustrate other photographers–double exposures, sunspots, and shadows–end up being the images’ greatest strengths.
Created for a site-specific installation as part of Project 18 at Sand Point Magnuson Park in 2003, Intrans explores the interior of Sand Point’s Building 18 through a stuttered video montage of receding, blurred, and panned images. Shot a year after the building was hit by arsonists, the crime-scene feel is accentuated by a low-humming soundtrack punctuated by bursts of disorienting, mutilated sounds. At Sand Point, the work was projected inside a dilapidated storage room. At Gallery 4 Culture, its effect is greatly diminished by being displayed on a small TV monitor with the sound turned low.
Greg Bell, Gallery 4 Culture’s manager, told me the committee that selected Heileson’s work as part of a year-long slate of programming wasn’t as interested in his video work as they were in his photographs. This is a damn shame because missing from the show are two of Heileson’s best video works to date, Scend and 101 Sunsets/101 Love Songs. Scend (shown at the Capitol Hill Arts Center this past year) is a two-screen projection of Death Valley shot from a car while ascending from the lowest point in North America to 5,000 feet and back down again. Regardless of whether or not you know this fact, the piece is transfixing. 101 Sunsets/101 Love Songs is a montage of 101 stock sunset photographs accompanied by multi-track samples of 101 love songs. The result, a never-ending sunset set to the tune of an unintelligible barrage of music, is like the fantasy of romantic love: more psychotic than it is pretty.
Map ref. , a series of large format C-prints, all of which were made this past year, articulates a direction Heileson has been headed in for awhile. A fully realized narrative, the series gives glimpses of parts of a whole as well as the whole, transitioning from isolated details to sprawling compositions. Like any good series, the individual photographs can either stand complete on their own or hang together. The images are more factual than not, tinkering with memory, of what has been dreamed or barely glimpsed. Map ref. (Arena) is the most deceptive of the group and seems to be one of Heileson’s experiments gone right. The stark contrasts on one side make it look like a detail from a miniaturized model while the other half, a mirror image, is obviously to human scale. The seam split down the center simultaneously unites and disjoints the perspective like a Band-Aid between fantasy and reality, like Lyman C. Smith’s skyscraper.