Sam Heydt "Change the Channel"
Sam Heydt "Change the Channel" 2020
Assemblage
Dimensions: 12 x 18 in, Framed 17 x 19 in
Limited Edition of 3
Includes certificate of authenticity
Sam Heydt (born April 20, 1986) is an American social practice and recycled media artist born/raised in New York City. She has lived/worked in Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Reykjavík, Udaipur, and Vienna. As a published author, producer, and lifelong social activist and environmentalist, Heydt has undertaken a range of altruistic, non-profit work and anchors her practice in advocacy. Through her unique manner of expression, she illustrates a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Esteemed as one of the pioneers of the recycled media movement, she works across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound, and text and employs a range of materials, often reinventing and trespassing their associative use. Marrying images of destruction with portrayals of the American Dream, her work confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for. Heydt's work has been shown in galleries, museums, art fairs, and film festivals worldwide, and sits in the permanent collection of a number of museums including D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum and the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. Her work can be viewed in full at www.samheydt.com
“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. Heydt’s 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