Sam Heydt "Good News From Iraq"

Sam Heydt "Good News From Iraq" 2019

Analog Assemblage (Collage)
Dimensions: 8” x 12” x 1”, Framed
Unique
Includes a signed certificate of authenticity   

Sam Heydt (b. 1986, New York City) is an American social practice and recycled media artist whose multidisciplinary work confronts ecological collapse, media saturation, and the unraveling mythologies of progress. Born and raised in New York, she has lived and worked internationally in Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Reykjavík, Udaipur, and Vienna—experiences that inform the global perspective embedded in her practice.
Regarded as a pioneer of the recycled media movement, Heydt works across film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound, and text. She employs a range of materials, frequently reinventing and trespassing their associative use to expose the fragility of economic, political, and environmental systems shaping contemporary life. Marrying images of destruction with portrayals of the American Dream, her work confronts the disillusionment of our time and the ecological and existential nightmare it has produced.
A published author and producer, as well as a lifelong social activist and environmental advocate, Heydt anchors her artistic practice in advocacy and altruistic, non-profit engagement. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, art fairs, and film festivals worldwide, and is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the State Hermitage Museum in Russia.

Artist Statement
“The edge is closer than we think, but illusion won’t free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history, and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality. Globalization has moved forward unevenly, and no one can say where this ‘New Frontier’ is leading us. As the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, the social landscape becomes increasingly fractured and alienated.
No longer in focus, all grand narratives dissipate in the space of post-history, as technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. The medium has swallowed the message. Our time is marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic, and climate change. As the vices of the first world burden the third, the skeletons of old factories serve as caveats of growing inequality. The silent landscape is a symptom of a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line.
Political dissidence is drowned out by the white noise of the media, as it sedates the social psyche with empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. My work presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it.”
— Sam Heydt