Current Review(s)
Orders and Divisions
Gina Heyer at BrundynI remember once when my mom was late to pick me up from school again. I’d spent my last 50 cents in the tikkie box only to connect to the answering machine; all hope of being picked up falling along with that coin. Kicking up and down the empty corridors, an unloved, lonely feeling came over me. This emotion was compounded by the absence of shuffling feet, ringing phones and shushed voices. This absence was only noticeable because of its implied presence, as if the building still echoed with these noises. It had sublimated the sound into dusty corners, cracked bricks, thinning linoleum and the glassy reflection of an ancient staff portrait. There’s nothing more lonely than a school at 4:30. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I know you didn’t mean it.)
Gina Heyer’s super-real paintings of school corridors in her recent exhibition, Order & Division, sharply invoked these memories. Not only in the representation of the corridors and staircases, which I think would strike almost anyone’s vestigial school nerve, but also in her pared-down compositions, her purposeful emptiness and her flat, smooth surfaces. In fact, so empty and clean are her forms and spaces that it borders on representational abstraction. An oxymoron to be sure, but there feels like something of the modernist’s abstract lurking in the corners of her careful perspectival figuration.
22 August 2012 - 03 October 2012
Listings(s)
'Order and Division'
Gina Heyer at BrundynBrundyn and Gonsalves present Gina Heyer’s second solo exhibition 'Order & Division', in which Heyer explores the empty corridors and bathrooms of a school building by meticulously rendering them in oil paint. Shaped by human action, these buildings in turn shape those who move through them. Spaces appear as mute holding cells where an individual confronts his or her own anonymity among the masses. Ordered, divided and disciplined, there is safety in the grid, in the architecturally and ideologically defined parameters of the public institution.
A silent drama plays out as linoleum, porcelain and painted walls reflect electric lights and diffused sunlight. There is both the urge to stay, to be seen and to escape as windows offer the promise of a world outside the dark solitary refuge.
22 August 2012 - 03 October 2012
