Description
Jeanne Heifetz
2009
Acid-etched glass rods, coated copper and silver wire, stainless-steel mesh.
20” x 20”
The Geometry of Hope series pays tribute to the group of postwar Latin-American artists whose work was shown together under that title, and in particular to the interplay of object and shadow in Gego’s “Drawings without Paper.” Where Gego used elaborate wire constructions to “draw” on the wall, here delicate strands of glass cast the shadows that reduce the work’s surface image to pure line. Multiple sources of light produce an intricate doubling or tripling of the image in black-and-white form.
Jeanne’s process in Geometry of Hope derives from traditional textile practice, reinterpreted in non-traditional industrial materials: stainless steel, glass, and wire. The linear structures draw on the random geometry of cultivated fields, Korean bojagi cloth, and the cracked-ice motif of traditional Chinese woodwork, as well as the natural geometry of soap bubbles and mineral formations. The two-layered pieces deconstruct an image and challenge the eye to reassemble it; the three-layered pieces give the illusion of peering into the structure of a crystal or a highly magnified cell.
Of her work Jeanne says: “The process of constructing the work, line by line, stands in for the perennial human search – whether a child’s inquiry or formal scientific investigation — for comprehensible pattern in the natural world.”
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