Artists' Fellowship - 1990
Sculpture
Artist Statement:
I devoted the entire time to a series of works in bonded iron and steel. This represented a significant change from the work I had been doing prior to this.
More about the Artist:
Heide Fasnacht first exhibited large-scale installations with Creative Time at “Art on the Beach” and PS 1. She was included in the artist’s book section of Documenta VI. An NEA grant and several stays at Yaddo and MacDowell provided the soil for a long period of growth and development. Through the 80’s, Fasnacht exhibited bodies of work in wood, rubber, and later in fabric at the Whitney Equitable and Moma, among other venues. In the late 80’s-early 90’s, she was the recipient of another NEA grant as well as NYFA, Guggenheim, and Tiffany grants.
Fasnacht had one-artist exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum in 2000 and The Anderson Galleries at VCU in 2004. The work in these exhibitions involved images of instability: geysers and building implosions, sneezes and exploding planes. She was working on one of these pieces the morning of 9/11 when she had to stop, grab her cats and evacuate her Tribeca studio that she had lived in since the early 80’s. After a stunning day of dislocation and alarm, searching for friends, for clarity, for a way to function amid the chaos, she returned home only to find the drawing of the erupting volcano on her desk; an image uncannily like that of the stricken towers. As everyone around her attempted recovery, including her own recovery from this event and an injury, Fasnacht was unable to return to her previous work and cast about for new ways to work.
After several years, she was surprised to find herself returning to an earlier mode of working. The concrete reality of her city was always in a state of flux. Since 9/11, that flux seemed to accelerate as buildings and roads went up and down with the speed of a flipbook. Objects became insufficient to represent this reality. As a result, Fasnacht began to make the city as an optical illusion: under construction, in process, there/not there.
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