SAM HEYDT AND NOELLA LOPEZ ON ANOTHER RESURRECTION SERIES

This series explores the mythology of a fictional past and the anonymity of cultural narratives through forged and manipulated blueprints of nostalgic vestiges resuscitated.

Contemporary cultural narratives speak to our common aspirations, fears and perplexities. Ritually retold, these stories reinforce a constructed history and sustained narrative that collectively we buy into. Infiltrating our collective imagination, the ideological contradiction at the heart of this myth is the delusion. The simulacrum does not hide the truth, but rather reveals its absence. Amongst the composite of semiotic signs, ‘surreality’ is defined as a kind of writing, photographs as a form of capturing.  The medium has swallowed the message, the multi-medium proliferated it in all directions.  There is no reality outside representation, but rather a socially constructed system of meaning. Subconsciously, we are structured by this repertoire of codes and grammar of meaning that dissects binary structures. However, the principal of reality is dead now. In its excess we stopped believing in it. The poverty of experience at the hands of our hyper-accelerated society brings into question the politics of memory. 

How do we come to understand ourselves if not in relation to our past, our history, our heritage?  If selfhood is built on an accumulation of the memories, what happens when they are diluted by the countless narratives flickering on screen? The arbitrariness of identity is an affect of the spectacle. It complicates how we internalise our past and understand ourselves in relation to others.

Sam Heydt

Heydt’s interprets the present through her unique perception and storytelling approach and recreate the past with objects, places, portraits. These images and their imagined stories are deep in meaning, possibilities and extrapolations. Heydt’s transparent judicious and exquisite layers add to the depth of the tales and the range of questions that we might want to ask. I do love this series. It is rich, beautiful, poetic, intriguing, philosophical and very personal.

Apparent old family shots, a bit faded, overexposed or slightly too dark create an intriguing series of portraits of individuals who may or may not be related. We would like to take them at face value and imagine happy family stories. Yet in a unique Heydt’s twist of fate, their portraits and their memories are transported, migrated, layered, super-imposed to blend with other characters, settings or objects. Though this unsettling subterfuge, they enter a new realm, a new dimension, they wonder what will be next and how they will fit in this new reality; sometimes confronting, always beautiful.

As these portraits end up being placed in these uncertain localities, it could be a unique way to explore the concept of six degrees of separation... It could be that by reinventing our own stories in a dream like fashion, our sense of reality and memory are totally subjective... It could be that truth is purely our own... It could be that what we perceive as our reality does not actually exist as such. What do you think?

Noella Lopez

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