Rising Awareness
Could one succeed in rising the level of awareness by sharpening one’s perception rather than repeating the vapid catchphrase, “raising awareness,” which has been coopted by an ever-growing money-raising industry that fails to improve our circumstances in a substantive way? Wearing a cocktail dress, I assembled a large kinetic structure made of wooden beams and ladders in front of the audience. I then walked and balanced on the twenty-foot wide structure at eight feet off the floor. Rising Awareness addresses my ongoing preoccupations about the physicality of experience, inhabiting the body, proprioception as the possible strongest sense of self, how spatial awareness correlates with overall awareness and self-awareness, how physicality enhances creativity, finding balance between gravity and groundlessness, a concept of happiness as the fullest expression of one’s particular cognitive potential, pushing boundaries, and the current irreverent politics of liability.

the girl in the wood frock
This project is based on a fairy tale in which a girl’s life is changed by what she wears. It is through clothing that the heroine experiences the outside world and the wood dress is both armor and prison for the girl, allowing her to escape the threat of incest while also disguising her true self from the prince.
Each dress in the series is an exercise in controlling one’s most immediate environment and how one navigates such an intimate spatial situation, using covers to filter what we feel by either exaggerating or muting sensation. They are also explorations of material technique and are made using a combination of high and low-tech methods and industrial materials such as printing press felt, rubber, and copper cable. The dresses are built rather than sewn and architectural construction informs their detailing.

felt-dress

Felt Dress is the third dress from The Girl in the Wood Frock series, based on a fairy tale in which a girl runs away wearing a set of dresses that save her life. Each dress is an exercise in controlling one’s most immediate environment. They are also explorations of material technique and are made through a combination of high and low-tech methods, with architectural construction informing their detailing.

Snake Eyes
Katy Heinlein’s exhibition Snake Eyes challenges the sublime possibilities of symmetry, and indulges in the humor, awkwardness, and flustered physicality that comes with disrupting that symmetry. Heinlein fashions pragmatic materials like wood and aluminum into nimble structures, ready to be wrapped and draped in costumes of brightly colored cloth. Like dressing for a night out, the works take on a very human folly: the effort to conceal, emphasize and seduce.

The Knowing
The artist Paul Kaptein based in Australia creates his work in sculpting the wood by hand. Kaptein work is generally figurative, very realistic representations of people often dressed in a hooded cowl. Spectacular representations of light wood to discover below.