Still Newfoundland #4 by Lynne Heller

Lynne Heller is a post-disciplinary artist, educator and academic. Her interests encompass both material and digital culture, photography, performance, graphic novels and sculptural installation. Heller completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and her PhD in 2016 at University College Dublin, Ireland from the department of Gender, Culture and Identity in the School of Humanities and Arts. Her research was practice-based, with a specialty in Digital Media Arts.

She is an Adjunct Professor at OCAD University, co-director of the Data Materialization Studio, Affiliate Member of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto and Reviews Editor of Virtual Creativity. She is also the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC Insight Grant (2019–2022).

Heller has an extensive exhibition record both nationally and internationally and is the recipient of grants from the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada. Exhibitions include Slippage at the Robert Langen Art Gallery, University at Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Chelsea Girls, Gallery 44, Toronto, ON, Homeostasis Lab, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, made and exhibited worldwide, Another Season: An International Exchange Project, Gallery 44, Toronto, ON (the exhibition travelled to the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, the Detroit Centre for Contemporary Photography, and the Hippolyte Photographic Gallery, Helsinki) and Hysteria: Past, Present, Future curated by Anonda Bell, Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, USA. She has exhibited at ISEA2017, Manizales and ISEA2014, Dubai, UAE, touring - Salisbury, Leicester, Bristol, London and online.

Recent exhibitions of her photographic work include Fentster Gallery, Toronto, CA, 2019 and her series NAFTA – North American Free Trade Art, was exhibited at Instituto Cultural de León, MX, 2018. Her photographic books and graphic novels are held by private collectors and following institutions: Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, York University Library, Toronto, ON, CA; The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; Artist’s Book Collection, OCAD University Toronto, ON, CA; Dalhousie Art Gallery, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, CA. Reviews of her work can be found in Re-Sculpt, the blog of the International Sculpture Center, NYC; ETC. Montreal, Canada; Art Papers, USA; The Globe & Mail, Canada; Canadian Art, Canada; Fiberarts, USA; The National Post, Canada and The Hamilton Spectator, Canada.

"Still Newfoundland is a series of 9 two-dimensional collages. I collected wild flora and foliage while hiking in Newfoundland and supplemented that material with bought flowers. I scanned the plants by putting them directly on a home office scanner, thereby digitized them at very high resolutions (1,600 pixels per inch). The shallow depth of field of the scanner renders the parts of the plants that are touching the glass in extreme detail but the imagery sharpness falls off quickly. By placing the flowers and foliage on a flat-bed scanner I can play with perspective. The resulting images have an unusual orientation that I could not obtain by taking a photograph of them. I then collage the digitized images together to create the compositions. Each image would be 6 feet square if it were printed out as intended. The files I’m working with are between 3 and 6 gigabits depending on how many layers they contain because they are so large and detailed.

"This work is a meditation on the nature of nature. By combining flowers and leaves gathered locally in Newfoundland with bought flowers from many different geographic regions the work interrogates our conception of the natural and the local. How in the era of the Anthropocene do we understand the interconnected global environment? I’m interrogating the history of plant migration and cultivation. The work also investigates notions of beauty and fascination with nature’s forms and means—for example, the exacting detail of tiny filaments, repeat pattern, incredibly subtle colour gradations. It also references the compositional qualities, luminosity and symbolism of historical work such as the memento mori."

Courtesy of LynneHeller.com