SLINKY
Deborah Hede
April 7 - July 1, 2018
Closing reception: Sunday, July 1, 12-5pm
3315 West Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90018
PRESS RELEASE:
A "Slinky" is a toy. And though there is an actual Slinky in Deborah Hede’s solo presentation at Shoot The Lobster, LA, all of the works feel "slinky," like wiry grids, and wiry materials. As an adjective or verb "slinky" seems almost anthropomorphic; an imagined body moving through the city, weaving through streets and buildings, collecting images and objects like relics of cartography. This exhibition maneuvers through the brutal nature of cities and maps traces of art: Drawings on handmade paper show abstract footprints of cities in lines and shapes that feel almost like an homage to a place that no longer exists; dozens of (lost and) found objects are set in plaster pedestals, forever memorialized; sculptures of wire and cloth are both delicate and brutal their “urban” suggestions.
Hede's ongoing approach to art-making has a foundation in post-modernist movements and reclaims the direct individual experience to value our interactions with one another and the city, and to question the role of spectacle in contemporary society. The works in Slinky document passages of time and space and reflect on what is socially constructed and what can be truly experienced. Structures are only seemingly rigid, only seemingly public, only seemingly private.
Deborah Hede received her MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL. Recent solo exhibitions include; Shoot The Lobster (Los Angeles), Ambach and Rice (Los Angeles), and Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles). Hede was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner foundation fellowship in 2013 d her work can be found in the collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Drawing Center Archives, The Museum of Modern Art, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, among others.
— Ebony L. Haynes