Jennifer Heifetz
Biography
Jeanne Heifetz is an artist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. She has had solo and two-person shows at galleries, art centers, and universities in California, Connecticut, Idaho, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Oregon. Her work has also been included in group shows at galleries, universities, and museums across the United States as well as in Italy and Israel. Her drawings have been included in the International Drawing Annual and in the curated registry of The Drawing Center. Heifetz holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate degree from NYU.
Artist Statement
The Geometry of Hope series pays tribute to the group of postwar Latin-American artists whose work was shown together under that title, and in particular to the interplay of object and shadow in Gego’s “Drawings without Paper.” Where Gego used elaborate wire constructions to “draw” on the wall, here delicate strands of glass cast the shadows that reduce the work’s surface image to pure line. Multiple sources of light produce an intricate doubling or tripling of the image in black-and-white form.
My process in this series derives from traditional textile techniques, reinterpreted in non-traditional industrial materials: stainless steel, glass, and wire. The linear structures draw on the random geometry of cultivated fields, Korean bojagi cloth, and the cracked-ice motif of traditional Chinese woodwork, as well as the natural geometry of soap bubbles and mineral formations.
Although I establish geometric rules for each piece, within those rules each piece is an improvisation, starting with a single line of glass and building outward, never sketched in advance. The process of constructing the work, line by line, stands in for the perennial human search – whether a child’s inquiry or formal scientific investigation — for comprehensible pattern in the natural world.
Exhibits
Dedee Shattuck Gallery | June 29 - July 31, 2016 | Surface Appeal: Material Perception
