Art St. Louis North Gallery: Saturday, 27 March 2010

Zoom: Window\Capture
Landscapes through the digital lens
The Work of Patty Heyda, Curated by W. Elysse Newman

Art St. Louis North Gallery
March 22 -April 22, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION MARCH 27, 6-8 pm

This exhibit features a series of 2 large paintings (the 'original' landscapes), the digital captures (print reproductions of portions of the larger pieces), and 14 smaller paintings (successive details). The work develops from the idea of how the digital image enhances what the eye can see. The small paintings are details taken from digital photographs of the larger original work. Subsequent images are digitally photographed from the second-order copy until the series is completed as a nested set of images. The work plays with ideas of originality, digital-visual schema and organic fractal structures.

Patty Heyda's current work is focused on the visual apparatus of seeing and the techniques of painting. Reinventing paint through the visual schema of the digital is a current theme in the series "Window_Zoom, Capture" Early in her explorations she fixed on the gesture of application of paint as an expression of movement. Her subject matter is the landscape. What interests her is not the static or framed view of the land, but landscape as a constantly changing and dynamic field. Landscape in this case is also a landscape of memory as the scenes are from childhood places. The process of reconstructing the view is a way of shifting between a preserved specimen of the past and the constantly changing abstract mental imagery of the present. The purposeful reduction through isolation of a select piece of the nominal original is a movement away from an embodied view to an abstract image no longer connected to the place.