Annie Heckman
Page 1 | 2 | Biography
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Airline to Heaven, Part I installation, 2008
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Annie’s recent teaching projects include work in drawing, painting, graphic arts, and video through New York University, the Jewish Museum New York, the Illinois Institute of Art, Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Community Arts Partnerships, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her writing practice has included experimental poetry as well as art writing & editing for exhibition catalogs, and she founded StepSister Press in late 2007 to promote discourse on emerging international art, literature, and critical theory projects. Her collection of texts Airline to Heaven, Part I is due for release in summer 2008, with writings by Terri L. Russ and Matt Dal Santo. She lives and works in Chicago with her husband, Peter Clark.
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She Falls in the Tank, Part 4, 2005
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Annie Heckman is an artist, writer, and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work explores mortality and afterlife ideologies through diverse media, incorporating sculptural animation installations and works on paper. Her exhibitions include work at New York Studio Gallery; the Hammes Gallery at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana; the South Bend Regional Museum of Art; the International Print Center New York; and the F.U.E.L. Collection in Philadelphia.
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Bleeding jellyfish, 2005
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Crying jellyfish, 2005
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Spike in the Dirt, 2007
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Born in Chicago in 1981, Annie grew up in the nearby suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. Her early training stems from after-school art classes at an artist’s storefront studio on the Northwest side of Chicago. There she studied drawing and painting, eventually becoming a teaching assistant and co-founding the Blue Spider Art Studio, a neighborhood arts center following in the tradition of the earlier storefront studio. Annie taught drawing, painting, and art history lessons, developing an ongoing curriculum for three years and directing the center’s educational programs with visiting instructors. She studied painting, sculpture, and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Chicago while coordinating this business, earning her BFA in Studio Art in December of 2002. Following graduation, Annie traveled with Loyola University Chicago’s summer program to study Italian language, literature, and art history in Rome during the summer of 2003. Annie moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2004 to study Studio Art at New York University’s Department of Art & Art professions. There she began making video projects and etchings simultaneously, slowly uniting these practices in what would become her Airline to Heaven animation series. She attended a residency through the Hungarian Multicultural Center in the winter of 2005-6, continuing to develop her animation and enriching it with work by musicians she encountered in Budapest & Csopak.
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Annie returned to New York and presented her thesis, Airline to Heaven, Part I, an animation project installed in an environment built out of fabric sculpture, presented alongside a suite of works on paper and writings. She received her MFA in Studio Art in May of 2006, going on to co-direct and teach through the department’s All Access Summer Program. Annie relocated to Chicago in the fall of 2006, setting up her studio to complete Airline to Heaven, Parts II and III.
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..diamond-patterned gown, 2006
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Artist Statement: The objects I make explore violence & pain in relation to suffering cuddly creatures. In Sartre’s Age of Reason, Daniel decides to punish himself by putting his cats in a basket and throwing it into the Seine. He imagines them clawing at each other as they drown, and in the end he brings them home instead of tossing them in. His impulse to access emotion via animal pain struck me as an awful and decadent gesture, made in a context where war was looming but not yet touching his body. My work explores these emotional negotiations to re-imagine the clash of brutal physical mortality with the hope of afterlife ideologies.
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