Heather Guertin “Two Thousand Eighteen”

Brennan & Griffin

[Image: Heather Guertin "Pink Check" (2018) Oil on canvas 68 x 54 in.]

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Brennan & Griffin presents Two Thousand Eighteen, an exhibition of new paintings by Heather Guertin.

Two Thousand Eighteen, when written out - is an abstraction of time. Much like Frank O’Hara’s poem 1951, the title focuses on perceptions of time in terms of past memories, the present and potential futures. The effects of which alter the construction of reality and the self.

In Guertin’s 2012 exhibition Development, she invented satirical characters for an in-progress conceptual novel, mirrored by figures in accompanying paintings. The novel describes the futile attempt by the characters to “self-actualize” through a change in environment and construction of a home in a new locale. The figures in the paintings reside in abstracted spaces defined and limited by the structure of the canvas.

The new paintings presented in Guertin’s Two Thousand Eighteen bring the external inward, taking reference from the immediate landscape surrounding Guertin’s new rural upstate New York studio. An acute interest in color filtered from her environment inform the gestural fields that populate the canvas. This invented space is a site for interactions with objects and her subjectivity, sculpting the environment as the environment sculpts back.

Heather Guertin b. 1981, Worcester, Massachusetts, lives and works in Brooklyn and Red Hook, New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Worm Turns Atmosphere, Brennan & Griffin, New York and The Whole, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Recent group exhibitions include Pictography, Sperone Westwater, NY and How to Call the Spirits, Chapter, NY. She has performed in locations such as White Columns in New York and in conjunction with the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. In 2013 Guertin published a novella titled Model Turned Comedian with Social Malpractice and Publication Studio and in 2015 a monograph of her works was published by Hassla Books.