Photo credit: Photo by Mario Gallucci. Courtesy of Adams and Ollman.

Laura Heit: Two Ways Down

January 24, 2015 to March 29, 2015

A hand-drawn animated installation and film, Two Ways Down takes inspiration from the Hieronymus Bosch work The Garden of Earthly Delights.  Reflecting on the momentary nature of life, Heit’s fantastical piece uses thrown shadows from tabletop dioramas and reflected and refracted animated projections to create a fleeting world where human-animal hybrids, specters, and body parts morph and flit across the walls.  

Portland-based, Heit is an experimental filmmaker and performance artist who has been making puppet shows/performance work and animated films for more than fifteen years. Disquieting and evocative, her films and performances seamlessly cross genres to unfold poetic visual narratives. Heit employs a strong handmade aesthetic, an irreverent sense of humor, drawing, puppetry and animation, to bring together ideas and stories about phantoms, ghosts, love, loss, and invisibility. Her works have been screened extensively in the U.S. and abroad (including Rotterdam, Annecy, Hong Kong International Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film festival, Walker Art Center, MOMA, Millennium Film, and the Guggenheim Museum). Recent performance venues have included the Pompidou Centre, Paris; FIMFA Puppet Festival Lisbon, Portugal; TBA, Portland; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Santa Monica Museum of Art. Heit has a BFA in film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. From 2007 to 2011, she was co-director of the Experimental Animation Program at Cal Arts in Valencia.