ARTIST STATEMENT
Working across different media – film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built into it. Heydt’s layered imagery conflate time and place, colliding and merging generations of possibilities, and disrupting logical relationships between occurrences. Through her unique manner of expression, she presents a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line, one marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds. The uncertainties and inevitabilities of which are drowned out by the white noise of the media and the empty promises it proposes for the future in truncates. Combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.
ARTIST BIO
Sam Heydt, (born April 20, 1986) is an American social practice and recycled media artist from New York City. Although currently residing in Vienna, Heydt has lived/worked in Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Reykjavik and Rajasthan. She has a degree in fine arts from Parsons School of Design, as well as a degree in media studies from The New School, Cooper Union, and University of Amsterdam and lastly in linguistics from University of Buenos Aires and La Sorbonne. After completing her studies, she launched Jane Street Studio, L.L.C. in Manhattan. Since established, the company has expanded to provide both design and marketing consultation in addition to photography and art direction. Its growing rooster of clients spans Europe, North & South America, Asia and Oceania. Ensuing this entrepreneurial undertaking, Heydt went on to attend artist residencies in Iceland, Australia and New Zealand; where she began documenting the exploitation of the natural world. A published author, producer and livelong environmental and social activist, Heydt has undertaken a range of altruistic, non-profit work – the most recent being in Rajasthan, India, where she helped produce a feature-length documentary on child prostitution. She also volunteers teaching refugees in Europe. Anchored in social advocacy, her art attempts to give a voice to the veiled, the forgotten, the exiled, the condemned and the silenced.
Heydt’s vision looks beyond the ordinary. In her practice, she works across a spectrum of different media – film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound, merchandize, text – and employs a range of materials often reinventing or trespassing their associative use. Esteemed as one of the pioneers of the recycled media movement, Heydt’s work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries [Kunstkomplex, Faena, Milk Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Das Weiss Haus, Queen Street Gallery, Broadway Gallery, Noelle Lopez Gallery], museums [State Hermitage Museum Russia, PERM Museum, Newport Art Museum, Krasnoyarsk Museum, Museum of Novosibirsk], and art fairs [Art Basel, Scope, I Never Read, Artissima, Art Cologne, Art Miami, Art Copenhagen, Fridge Art Fair, Clio Art Fair, Vienna Contemporary, 5th Biennale of Fine Art, Argentine Biennale]. Notable projects and awards include: Aesthetica Art Prize, London Group Open Art Prize, LACDA, Call for Chelsea, PX3 Prix de la Photographie, ImagoRevolution, LICC, Celeste prize. Further, Heydt’s direct animation films have also been screened in hundreds of festivals internationally [SxSW, Video Art Miden, Traverse Video, Cefalu Film Festival, Proseco de Error].