Orson Heidrich
10/4/21 - 24/4/21
Exhibition Text
Catalogue
Heidrich’s initial training in documentary photography informs his research practice into the relationships between industry, object and human; at how they influence the way we inhabit space and consume digital information(imaging residues). These investigations are framed within the technical history of photo-imaging itself and the idea of the artist as a 'complex manufacturer'. His material manipulation of industrial printing techniques, re-contextualised construction-based substrates, and the subsequent folding, bending and casting(melting) of these objects, embeds the image making process within the materiality of a post industrial landscape. Exposing the malleable nature of the photographic image, the works utilise manipulated photographic scans that are mechanically printed on aluminium panels. Employing further industrial fabrication processes, the aluminium planes are then mechanically folded, bent, curved, crushed and coerced into their final stances harmonising the 2D plane of the photographic image with its structural recipient.
This aestheticized surface opens up a hybrid space between digital, industrial and speculative forms (being). By collapsing and expanding investigations into industrial manufacturing and the photographic trace (object), Heidrich articulates the reflective surface of our own social apparatus, and investigates the idea of the artist as a set of complex manufacturing relationships: both as social fabric, digital matrix, industrial manufacturer and mimetic surface.