NYAB Event - Sue Hettmansperger "Entanglement"

Sue Hettmansperger "Entanglement"

A.I.R. Gallery

This event has ended.

A.I.R. Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Sue Hettmansperger, whose imagery engages the complex entanglement of nature and culture. The language of painting embodies the morphology of form through process, materiality and its collaboration with the structure of space. Walking the line between abstraction and representation, the imagery of this series traces fragments from the interior of the human body, botany, digital distortion, and manufactured objects, collapsing their boundaries. The internal rationale of the forms and images shift and are transformed, as though influenced by mathematical principles of topology (rubber-sheet geometry). Resulting hybrid chimera-like images acknowledge the present ethos of genetic and digital manipulation, reflecting the complex relationship of humans to their environment. This artwork seeks to mirror a current cultural perspective in which boundaries between organisms are increasingly blurred, and our awareness of digitally altered images makes us question the truthfulness of everything we see in visual culture. Foregrounding the interdependence of human and botanical, organic and inorganic systems in a conflicted embrace, this series provokes thought about cultural attitudes and perceptions of our place within nature.

A catalogue with two essays accompanies the show. Kathleen Edwards, Curator of Art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art states, “I think of her spaces as “scapes”—simultaneously landscape, bodyscape, and mindscape.” In the second catalogue essay, independent critic and artist Joe Fyfe writes, "Hettmansperger declares her loyalty to the artist as poet, the one who internalizes and legislates, that begins to interpret what must be interpreted through feeling and depiction.”

The artist is a recent Guggenheim recipient, has exhibited throughout the country and teaches Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa. She received her MA degree from the University of New Mexico in 1974 and has been affiliated with A.I.R. since 1988.