HEIDI ZUMBRUN
Photographs & Video
January 26 - February 26, 2005
BIOGRAPHY
PRESS RELEASE
Installation Views
The images in the exhibition emphasize the lack of a fixed explanation for these perplexing white sculptural forms. They seem animal-like, with a profoundly visceral appearance and bizarre, skin-like texture that shines with an otherworldly glow in the outdoor light. Like an encampment of cloned pods, they seem alive and inhabit the landscape with an uncertain permanence while suggesting their own hidden, interior environment. Zumbrun creates an imagined narrative by documenting these objects in landscape in a way that is suggestive of a phenomenal event. The viewer may question whether these objects are commonplace and merely unrecognizable in the context of the presentation, or follow Zumbrun’s suggestion by allowing their imagination to develop alternative possibilities. Zumbrun’s act of appropriating these objects while resisting the definition of their intended purpose creates a situation of suspended interpretation and invites one to muse on the aesthetic value of an object in the artist’s self-created world.
Photographs and Video follows from Zumbrun’s acclaimed Post Op and Anatomy series of large-scale images of parts of disfigured stuffed animals and toys that function as surrogate vehicles for the comprehension of psychological complexities of medical uncertainty. In this new series Zumbrun expands on her preoccupation with the issues of appropriating and re-contextualizing images of anthropological interest in her conceptual art practice, challenging the notion of fixed meanings to open a new realm of possibility.