Marvelous Art Gallery is pleased to present HETEROTOPIA, an invitational, thematic online event that presents collectors with the opportunity to explore and purchase artworks from Sam Heydt remotely in a curated digital and interactive space.

HETEROTOPIA

Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it.  

Illusion won’t free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality.  As the social landscape becomes increasingly fractured and alienated, the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one. The silent landscape’s a symptom of a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line.  Our time is marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic and climate change. The vices of the first world are the burden of the third.  

The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, as opposed to time, which functions as distributive operatives to spread out space.  However harm here, is harm there.  The two decade long war waged against “terrorism” has resulted in a mass refugee crises, the pollution produced from manufacturing our products overseas is the contributing factor behind to global climate change. You cannot dislocate the rising of sea level or reroute cataclysmic storms. Yet for decades the West has proven successful in keeping the repercussions of their actions out of sight, out of mind.  But there is a limit to everything. 

If utopia or dystopia can be conceptualized as a reflection in the mirror, an unreal ‘placeless place’, the concept of heterotopia can be understood as both the reflection and the mirror itself, simultaneously real and relating to the space surrounding it, and unreal in the virtual image it reflects.  A world within a world, heterotopias creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space.  It is both an inverted analogy of society and a parallel space to reality, an approximation of  (dys)(u)topia and a space of radical difference transparent to, or of indifference to, their inhabitants. 

Appropriating the discursive framework buttressing heterotopia, this body of work collides two realities into a singular space, both real and unreal.  In relation to time, the events illustrated can or are occurring simultaneously albeit geographically estranged.  After all, we are in the epoch of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of colliding spacio-temporalities.  Conflating time and place, the layered imagery merges and disrupts logical relationships between occurrences presenting multiple histories and narratives within a singular frame or iteration.  Combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.