2.12.10 - 4.10.10 

On Friday, February 12, 13FOREST Gallery will open Alone|Together, an exhibition of recent work by Dorothea Van Camp and Jeffrey Heyne of Fort Point, Boston. As artists and a married couple, Van Camp and Heyne have a thorough understanding of each other’s creative processes and frequently work behind the scenes as each other’s critics and supporters. In addition to being visual artists, Van Camp is a graphic designer and Heyne an architect who designed the award-winning space in which they live and work. 

Alone|Together will be a rare opportunity to view side by side the artists' individual work in photography, print and mixed media as well as a video which stands as their first fully collaborative undertaking. 

Seen together, the artists’ mixed-media prints and photographs bear different aesthetics, but their concern for surface, form and color are handled with equal intelligence and sensitivity. The majority of Van Camp’s images are vector-based computer drawings that were initially screen- or litho-transferred onto variously sized panels, and then built up with oil and wax. Through this process, Van Camp produces a series of biomorphic images that inhabit colorful, heavily textured worlds. In the artist’s words, the visual and textural qualities of this series aligns them far less with digital output than with the tradition of deeply etched intaglio printmaking. In short, they resolve Van Camp’s admitted love/hate relationship with technology. 

Jeffrey Heyne’s work complements Van Camp’s in its larger scale and obvious embrace of computer-based image making. In his triptych Fascia, for instance, three photographic views of a nineteenth-century, marble bust are presented in ultra-soft focus and an equally soft palette. Each photograph is cropped as though to protect the identity of the woman who posed for the original bust. Transferred to panels and finished with a soft sheen, the images exist in a world of anonymous, impossible beauty that can be seen — even touched — but never entered. In a large, nine-panel, filmstrip-like resin work, Heyne presents another world — this one in motion. Here he “reanimates” a single image of a young woman skipping rope taken from a classic nineteenth-century, stop-action sequence by photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Left to right, Heyne distorts the image to an ideal of frenetic, forward motion, slows the subject down to stillness, then sets her back into action. 

As a point of intersection between the two artists, Alone|Together will feature a video that Van Camp and Heyne produced as a team. Titled Time_emiT, the work is comprised of a series of digital recordings of water surfaces shot by Heyne and edited to appear one atop the other by Van Camp. With each layer emerging and receding in seeming random order, the video presents a world that is abstracted from the image of water to become a meditation on perpetually changing color, texture and time. The temporal element is underscored by the video’s layered soundtrack: samples from Brian Eno’s recording January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, which references a real-world vision to build a 10,000-year clock; and from idea-artist Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony slowed to a run time of 24 hours without pitch distortion. 

Alone|Together is scheduled to open as part of "Romancing the Square," a series of events presented during Valentine's Day weekend by the businesses of Capitol Square in conjunction with the Arlington Center for the Arts.