CJ Heyliger: Minding Time
Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce Minding Time, artist CJ Heyliger’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is timed at ten years since his first at Gallery Luisotti and serves as an opportunity to observe how the artist has used photography to interpret the concept of time over the last decade. It is a survey of several series including Hell Mirage, 13 Vs, and most recently Horizon Studies, a set of small-scale works made using analog and digital methods.
Rather than depicting fixed moments, Heyliger’s photographs illustrate a more speculative view of time. Through a multitude of gestures–blurs, inversions, and even the physical manipulation of prints–the works in the show question the photograph as a means to describe time and space.
The earliest work in the exhibition is Goler Canyon (from Nothing Stands Still), which presents the viewer with vibrating geometries of a desert canyon and mountain ridge that are the result of multiple visits to the same site over time. During these trips the artist would try to reorient himself and see how closely he could make the same photograph on the same piece of film. The resulting image not only points to a layering of time which is present in the physical geologies of the sites but also undercuts the idea of a photograph representing a singular moment.
Works from 13 Vs present time through solarized photographs that have crossed a tipping point of exposure to the sun. Much like a quick sunburn on a bright summer day, the energy of the sun overwhelms the chemistry of the film and the familiar areas of light and dark as seen by the human eye are inverted. There is a haunting reversal in these black and white images which are simultaneously positive and negative. The soft reflections of sunlight, the ocean waves, and the readymade romance of the Pacific are subverted and presented as something to inspect with closer attention.
The first work in the exhibition, Westerly Wind, a suspension of a cloud of desert dust sifting through the artist’s hand, almost as if in a cinema still, is more “straightforward” work but still illusionistic and serves as a starting point for the explorations of time to follow. The latest works track time as sunlight fades from various locations. Finally, Heyliger introduces two singular transformations of the work by physically tearing prints and placing the halves side by side—their state permanently altered. The tear evades reproduction and is an action that cannot be performed the same way twice. Altering the print this way is an acknowledgement of the limitations of being human, and a way for the artist to attempt marking a fixed moment in time.