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Representational Visualization in the Abstract
Aside from the large canvases on the wall and a stack of art stored in a corner, Heather Gordon’s studio at Golden Belt doesn’t look like the typical image of the artist’s lair that I hold in my mind. No paint covered brushes. No rickety easels or half finished canvases. The air smells like microwave popcorn rather than turpentine, and the lighting is dimmer than I would expect.
The sliding door is held open by a bucket. A little black mixed breed dog with the bulging eyes of chihuahua sniffs me suspiciously. I bend to pet him, and he licks my chin. Several chairs are arranged in a semicircular conversation area around a velvet green chair. A bookshelf hides the desk where Heather works during the day as a freelance graphic artist and web designer. The books on the shelves cover a wide variety of topics, but most seem to be about computer code and web development.
Heather’s mind is as varied as the contents of her bookshelves. “I tend to pull from here and here and here and here. And it kinda simmers together and I get a soup,” she says. Our conversation jumps quickly between literature, algorithms, current events, chemistry, computer science – firing off ideas so rapidly that I am reminded of a game from my childhood called Mouse Trap – rotate a plastic lever to spin an old boot that tips a small silver ball down a set of crooked stairs and sparks a continuing series of chain reactions that ultimately spring a mouse trap. But in Heather’s case, those random, skittering electrical impulses, like a mental Rube Goldberg machine, create works of art.
“One afternoon I was taking a lab, and you have to create these programs, and in order to do that you have to create variables and you have to name your variables. These projects can be really dry, so I would always name them according to characters in a book. I had named this particular project according to Moby Dick. I had an Ahab and a Starbuck and a Queequeg and all that stuff. My professor was giggling over my shoulder at it, and the nineteen-year-old boy next to me didn’t know who Ahab was. So I thought to myself how completely literate this boy was (clearly because he’s in college), and illiterate too, I mean, not well read. I had these graph papers, they were chart papers for measuring temperature change in different environments, and they had been sitting on my desk for a year or two. I didn’t know what to do with them. That’s when I thought to myself, “I’m going to take Moby Dick and convert however many characters will fit on this paper to binary and I’m going to plot them.” Because it’s completely representations and completely illegible. I thought it was hilarious, really funny. So I call these my 8-bit Classics. And I’ve been going through a list of 100 books that were culled together from 100 famous writers.”
That one moment in Heather’s life has spawned a collection of art that plays with different representations of literacy and how we interpret data.
“Each work looks at the idea of data and their meaning – that moment where we acquire what it is that the value and the meaning is, but only you decide.”
Heather painstakingly plots in ink on chart paper the 8-bit binary strings created from classic works of literature. The viewer can enjoy her ink drawings as works of art but is not away that they are viewing a representation of, say, Moby Dick, unless they are informed by the artist. Heather enjoys playing with the idea of literacy vs. illiteracy, and she admits that she thinks it’s funny to be the only one with the inside knowledge to appreciate the unknowing illiteracy of her audience. She laughs and says, “You can understand Ulysses just as well this way.”
She has used the same method with sound bytes. At first glance, these larger canvases appear to be rounded abstracts, but the representation goes far deeper than the layers of paint. These works represent a moment in time reduced to the most basic elements, the ones and zeros that make up binary code.
While the viewer may see a large red bullseye, what they are actually witnessing is audio of a historic moment:
“The big round ones are called Sound Bytes – a moment in time, an experience that is very personal for me, but also a cultural moment. This particular one was Nadia Comaniche getting her first perfect ten on the uneven bars. I remember watching that on television, and you couldn’t have a ten on the screen because the scoreboards could only go up to 9.9, so they had to do a 1.0, because they couldn’t do a ten. That’s the sound of the announcers at that moment and the crowd screaming, the whole thing as an mp3. I extracted it out of the video and then changed it to ones and zeros, and I’ve plotted it there.”
She graphed those points on canvas and filled in the grid with a vivid red, matching Nadia’s leotard. The resulting painting is a visual representation of an audio of that historic event. “You can be so abstract with your information, but in fact, every detail is represented,” she says.
Heather has similar paintings that depict Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, and Bill Clinton’s forceful denial of a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
“These experiences, the information we get, they are all sequential. There’s a sequence to it, a time and a position where that happens in our lives. That there is a one and a zero, there’s an absence and a presence. And when something like this happens, a tiny little stick of dynamite gets a perfect ten, it’s like a spike. It’s a one in a sea of zeros. It’s this moment that we will remember forever.”
“I was thinking about my own nomadic self, being a military brat, and how this sense of place is very specific, but the sense of time is very elastic. If I remember the perfect ten, I’m drawn right back to that place and time again, sitting in front of the TV. I remember what house we lived in. I remember so much about that moment. So all of it gets compressed into that moment again. There’s something very fascinating about having a cognitive space combined with a geographic place. Something that can be so specific, and yet we remember that very differently. It’s so specific to you. And just as tangible to you and elastic. I think it all boils down to representation. I’m really interested in representation because I think that we think our data is so specific. The more and more that we have of it. We have these huge data sets that are meant to define and track or do whatever they do to represent. But they don’t. Because you can push it this way, you can bias it that way, you can exclude something, you can emphasize some other things, you can remember things differently if I tell you this.”
She used as an example her series of artworks she calls her Conveyance pieces:
“These are all about how words in different contexts mean different things. So the 829 is the numeric value of the word “convertible.” So if you take “convertible” and change it to ACII values like a computer would and add them all up, you would get 829. So the word “convertible” means the car, 829 means convertible, but it can also be a sofa that can be converted to a bed. So context is everything.”
But Heather doesn’t limit her focus to literature, politics, or world events. Her newest creation, a series of origami-like paintings, uses data sets from her own life. She asked herself, “Can I take a set of relationships, a set of values, and make a shape out of it? And can I do that in such a way that I’m making a sculpture without making a sculpture?”
“I took a geographic map of the United States and I took seven people in my life that are important to me. I plotted points – where were they born and where they live now. So I plotted all those points, vertices, and I made a tree, so I connected them. Then I figured out what all the “as the crow flies” distances are on these different segments, so I had spatial relationships on these different segments, and then I took that information and put it into TreeMaker [a program for constructing crease pattern for origami bases]. And then used that to create an asymmetrical folding pattern. So you could actually fold these shapes. And that’s so cool. I call the one with all the people in my life How to Fold My Heart, and I have one with all the places that I’ve lived (which is a lot since I’m military), and I call that one How to Fold My Home.
Heather takes the flat shape, the flat folding pattern, and interprets it to create a shape out of the pattern.
“Now this is not at all what the shape would look like. I mean these look dimensional, but that’s not all what it would fold up to be, it’s just kinda me making a shape out of the grid, unfolded.”
She says she and her father once tried to fold one – she really wants the paintings to be mathematically sound – but they were unsuccessful.
The paints that she uses in the origami series are all premixed paints and paint remnants from other people’s home improvement projects. “I see a can labeled bathroom or kitchen, and I have to buy it,” she says.
“Making this work has been very much an exercise in getting to know me. I didn’t realize I was so geeky.”
“I make my living in the digital world. I work a lot with data, but I’m an analog girl. I like a pen and paper. I like to read paper books. I like to read magazines. I don’t like my cell phone. I pine for the days of the mimeograph machine and the smell of the glue. Do you remember that? There’s something about that that is tactile. It’s engaging and I miss that. And maybe that’s what some of this work is about.”
Heather takes the idea of engaging with her audience very seriously. In fact, she is the Artist Liaison for Golden Belt. She loves meeting with the public and talking about her art. Her work can be viewed in Studio #133 at Golden Belt each Third Friday of the month when the artists open up their studios to the public.
The Artists at Golden Belt, in partnership with Liberty Arts and the Cordoba Arts Center, will host the second annual “Twelve by Twelve” Art Sale and Benefit Concert. The event will be a fundraiser for KidZNotes, a Durham-based musical education non-profit organization that fights poverty and encourages positive decision making by instructing and engaging children in classical orchestral music.
The event starts Thursday, November 15th from 5:30-7:30pm with over 250 works of art for sale and will feature a one-hour performance by KidZNotes students and instructors with special guest, the Eric Hirsh Quartet. There is a suggested donation of $10 at the door, 100% of which directly benefits KidZNotes. Free food and drink will be provided. Participating artists will donate at least 12% of all proceeds from the show to KidZNotes.
Art is always better when it is shared!
designing the triangle 