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J Gavin
Heck |
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J. Gavin
Heck Artist's Statement I am a storyteller. Though I've no formal training in art, I find there are times when the world seems to need to be reminded of itself, have a light shined somewhere that is ignored, gone dark. As a war orphan my artwork has naturally been shaped by a love of the absurd, the Dadaist, surrealist, butoh and situationist movements that spun naturally from artists' reactions to the insanity of war. The character of my work has evolved, as my exposure to new forms, media and materials has grown. My method is obsessive cataloging and collection of materials about a particular story, to the point of total immersion, the layers of information eventually bubble out into the world. In every room, every pocket, every cell I begin to tell the story, until it is released. The presentation often takes form as parade floats, kinetic sculptures, occasionally I create something with enough resonance for the media to carry that message to the larger sometimes seemingly disconnected stone-casting world. I collaborate with existing organizations, and encourage them to stretch their understanding of their missions, often creating absurdist tableaus that allow a joyful revisioning of the world, that for a moment entertains the possibility of a stone less utopia. When I told my first stories, they took the form of poems, then short stories, then songs, then plays and now they involve performers, sculptures, sound and text has naturally fallen to a lesser element, encouraging the message to be carried by the more universal language of symbols and movement. Occasionally I return to haiku, cutups, the 1000 word snapshot, to clean my palate, to tell the story of the small moment. Ultimately I will turn the dreams I have upon looking at construction cranes unused on the weekends into storytelling platforms for amazon puppetry, calling and responding from across the waves. Telling simple universal stories of love, loss, redemption and the spaces in between. |
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