Squared at Gallery 120

Chris Heidman exhibiting work now thru September 19, 2022

Chris Heidman, a Minneapolis-based painter and music producer, is exhibiting his work now through Monday, September 19, 2022, at Gallery 120. Art shows and exhibitions are hosted at Gallery 120’s brick-and-mortar location in the atrium of the Fine Arts building on the Inver Hills Community College campus in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.

Chris grew up on the plains of Iowa, got his B.F.A. from Colorado State and his M.F.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1993 in painting. After Chris completed his master’s, his music project, “Sukpatch,” was discovered by the legendary United Kingdom DJ, John Peel. Chris was then signed by the Beastie Boys to their Capital Records imprint, Grand Royal, which lead to a 10-year run in the music industry. Eventually, Chris walked away from performing music in 2007 after releasing four albums that received critical praise.

He has since focused on painting–and still produces music for film and TV. His music was an extension of his art, layered, pioneering, and experimental. It created a balance between his visual and audio sensibilities. His current work is an exploration of an “analog” sensibility within our current digital world. Finding ways to express a sense of home, and a calm, within a world where consumption of culture is streamed, and not owned.

Finding inspiration in the everyday (candy wrappers, algorithms, logos as well as landscapes), Chris tries to create something static and beautiful that can connect the things that we dispose of to the things we truly need. Through the use of formalism, color, and taped edges, these works are meant to mimic something digital and concise, but the imperfections of making something by hand allows the work to have humanity.

WHAT: Squared

WHO: Chris Heidman

WHEN: Now thru Monday, September 19, 2022

WHERE: Gallery 120

Fine Arts Building
Inver Hills Community College
2500 80th Street East
Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076
General: 651-450-3000
Gallery: 651-450-3101

Chris Heidman: Artist Statement

As the world has shifted (very overtly) from what you might call an “analog” perspective towards a “digital” reality, it’s no accident that the arc of my work reflects this as well. Producing immediately recognizable, clean lines, polished, opaque, negative spaces and figurative objects whose origin you might guess, stems from a lineage that began on a disposable item, like a candy wrapper, or a fast food logo, set within a landscape.

As our world has shifted, we each have our own reality, and our own truth, much of which has been created by an algorithm.

What would it look like if we were to take those things that were witnessed and re-interpreted them to the canvas? Keep in mind, this is not simply the equivalent of a first-person confessional, or merely a listing of things seen, but an expression, as a result of a consequence of my many experiences and the effect they had, and how they become a part of the process, a process that has become repeatable.

It’s an illusion on a “This Is What I Want!” scale. I try to allow the viewer to buy into the world we tell ourselves over and over again isn’t real. My work attempts to create a feeling of home and comfort within a reality where consumption of culture is streamed, and not owned.