Swimming Pool Project Space
presents: Love Letters to Antarctica:
New work by Annie Heckman and Lorien Jordan
Opening August 21st, 2010
from 7-10pm

Press Release:

Swimming Pool Project Space is proud to present Love Letters to Antarctica, an exhibit created by artists Lorien Jordan and Annie Heckman that takes on an uncanny, wistful outsider's view of Antarctica's history, landscape, and animal life. With research of visual and narrative information ranging from journals of the early explorers of modern Antarctica to cinematic explorations by Jacques Cousteau and Werner Herzog, these artists create a project that both explores the limitations of our understandings of Antarctica's environment and revels in the emotional space of longing for distant, life-threatening adventure.

Lorien Jordan's drawings:

Love Letters to Antarctica is Lorien Jordan's sonnet to the explorers and the explored. It is a suite of simple line drawings and etchings that exists as a moody narrative, highlighting both the naivety, brutality, and sometimes absurdity of human involvement in the early days of modern Antarctica. For the last five years Jordan has obsessively read and collected everything she could find about the history of people in Antarctica. These stories have given her mental images and inspiration for the melancholic scenarios of the stolen moments she portrays in her work.

The diaries of the explorers and their men were originally published to emphasize the conquering hero, but Jordan has found the side notes more telling and interesting, as they show glimpses of the fragility of the men underneath. These glimpses range from the comparison of the explorers to a boat-load of Peter Pans to one diarist's description of how the sun's reflection on the ice looked like kittens playing. Jordan picks out these details and amplifies them in her work, in turn fetishizing the continent in a way that echoes the activities of the Victorian explorers who hauled their china, crystal, and pianos to Antarctica to plant flags in the snow.

Annie Heckman's installation:

The space created in the installation is an image of a place as received by dreamers from afar, using bits of evidence from filmmakers and explorers to build a surreal, emotional installation of Antarctic landscape, filled with phosphorescent iceberg sculptures, glowing snow, abject penguins, sculpted underwater topography, and paper jellyfish. Heckman creates a space that demonstrates reverence for this threatened site, but also captures something of the lens of fantasy through which she views it as a person who has never visited such a place, with a sense of distorted perspective in scale and heightened phenomena of color and light.