Constructed Disillusionment: The Upcycled Works of Sam Heydt.
‘ONE’ Series - Interview 5.
Shortlisted for the Round Lemon Award 2021, Heydt’s work is an accumulation of recycled media, forming works which are both provocative and political. Here Heydt talks to us about the contexts and methods which underpin her practice.
Can you tell us about your background, where you started and where you are now?
In retrospect, my interest in art was sparked at an early age by my father, who himself is a painter. Aspects of his influence can be seen in my work, despite the divergence in our subject matter: his watercolors build on the aesthetic tradition of portraiture, whereas my work embraces the satirical and nonsensical aesthetic of Dada underpinning it with conceptual and political discourses.
As one of the pioneers of the recycling media movement, your work has been displayed worldwide in an impressive number of shows. Could you tell us more about the concept of recycling media and your process of making work?
In short, I rely on recycled material as a basis for creation, oftentimes employing new media to resurrect “old" static media forms and trespassing the associative of found objects. As a lifelong environmentalist, my preoccupation with up-cycling, recycling, and conservation inevitably bled into my practice. I coined the term in response to the realization that Dadaism, Surrealism, Lettrism, Neo Dadaism, Pop, etc fell short of articulating the work I was generating and the approach I was employing. Working across a range of mediums with stylistic schizophrenia, one of the few constants threaded through my practice was the reliance on recycled media - both physical and symbolic.
You work predominantly with collage and video. What is it about these mediums that you like?
Collage and direct animation film both placate my proclivity for fragmentation, amalgamation, diss/association and up/recycling. I have this urge to destroy, to tear apart ... a kind of transgression I amend through the resuscitation of it residual resurrected with new meaning, context, intention. The unpredictable construction of images and sequences born out of disorder and spontaneity is of primary interest. Anything with a history attracts me, as through its dated content and visible signs of wear it enucleates the passage of time, yielding an unfinished narrative begging to be interpreted, untangled, dilated.
‘Eye Exam’
‘Diver’
Are there any contemporary influences you would like to mention?
I’m inspired by the usual suspects; dead: Tamara de Lempicka, Egon Schiele, Matisse, Arbus | living: Deborah Roberts, Adrian Piper, Edward Burtynsky, Urs Fischer, Tom Deininger, Guerrilla girls, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger [to name a few]. Pioneers in the medium that I draw inspiration from include: Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Jacques Villeglé, Katrien de Blauwer and John Stezaker.
Can you describe an artwork/project or series that you consider to be pivotal to your career?
I am inclined to believe that the work at hand, whatever it may be, is the most pivotal to date. It is afterall informed by the two decades of work, research and experimentation that preceded it and closest aligned with my current interests and mindset.
Your work is quite abstract, has a striking visual impact, and addresses issues happening all around the globe such as climate change and societal progress. Would you describe your practice as political?
I understand my work as a form of environmental activism and a platform for political and socioeconomic discourse. Through a myriad of mediums and technical approaches, my work aims to convey the different phenomenologies of our increasingly fractured social landscape. It sheds light on the material inequalities of 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 the white noise of the media and the empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. Having spent the last decade documenting scarred landscapes and marginalized communities, I hope the socially conscious work I’ve done speaks for itself and brings to forefront of people’s contemplation imagery that transcends their site-specific locations. In my more recent mixed media work, I combine images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream- confronting the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.
‘Orange Glow’
‘Hike’
You studied in different locations around the world such as France, Italy, the US, Argentina, Netherlands, and India. How does this experience of being multicultural and having lived in various places influence your practice?
Art is a product of lived experiences, thus the evolution of my work has been shaped by such and has over time and through practice become more refined. From my point of view, My practice has undergone three pivotal transformations throughout my career. However across all the stages, the focus on environmental and social issues has remained consistent. My background is in photography - a focus which shifted from fine art, to fashion, to finally documentary where it stayed for many years. Flesh trade and systemic caste based issues brought me to India, the mining industry to Australia, deforestation to New Zealand; I visited the once largest man-made structure while documenting landfills and saw the periphery of Iceland while archiving abandoned homes. While there, an accident left me bedridden for the better half of a year which marked the second transition of my art career. Captive to immobility, I began experimenting with direct animation film and 35 mm slides. Recovery forced me to slow down. I moved to Venice, Italy and worked at a Printmaking Studio. It was there that I met a Diedre, a mixed media artist who collaged maps. In hindsight, her work left a considerable impression on me as years later when I moved to Vienna I too began to collage, marking the third transition. All three stages have since informed the work I am currently doing, as it draws and interweaves on all the aforementioned mediums.
‘Chlorine’
Do you have any current projects or shows that you are working on?
To be honest, it’s hard to say. With covid still looming, it’s been hard to plan for the future, not knowing when the future starts. That said, hopefully the doors of my gallery KITSCH will open soon. One can also expect to see lots of new work from me exploring the post-internet aesthetic in the form of NFTs. I have a thirty or so exhibitions overseas I am currently preparing for in the coming months, most notably a museum show in the Netherlands as well as a solo show in Doge’s palace on south of Italy. In the grand scheme of things, I am trying to open an orphanage/school in Rajasthan that takes in and educate young girls from the Banjaara caste that would otherwise be funneled into prostitution.
What is the best way for the other to connect with you?
Websites:
www.samheydt.com | www.jane-street-studio.com | www.stopbeingevil.com
Social Media:
