Heather Clark
January 6-29, 2017
Maintenance
In her artwork, Heather Theresa Clark builds systems that critique our current world predicament. Her work plays on what she calls cultural neurosis: the human tendency to over-consume, over-build, over-groom, etc. in lieu of direct physical exertion to ensure survival. She views this as a misdirected attempt to satisfy basic primal urges for shelter, food, and clothing in a society where actions are grossly amplified because one gallon of gasoline equals five hundred hours of human work output.
Heather’s work and perspective have evolved from her background in green building, urban planning, and ecology, and most recently from her life in exurbia, where she has lived and worked for the past six years. She is embedded in a landscape that feeds on cultural neurosis. Meadows, forests, and farms transitioning to tract homes and cul de sacs have become her muse. As an inhabitant of exurbia, Heather is both complicit and trapped in the consumption economy and its byproducts – climate change, inequality, unhealthiness, boredom.
Here, the uncanny valley, which is usually discussed in relation to artificial intelligence, appears to Heather in the industrially designed and generated vernacular; she works with her hands in defiance. She dissects infrastructure, places, and the meaning of the built environment and its relation to nature.
Heather Theresa Clark approaches artmaking as a planner, green developer, and ecologist. She holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, summa cum laude, in Environmental Science and Community Planning, a self-designed major.
As founder of Biome Studio, art is Heather’s tool to shift the paradigm of everyday life. Attempting to lead the path toward zero-energy buildings and neighborhoods, Heather has overseen the largest deep energy retrofit in the U.S., converted historic mills into green low-income housing, and installed over one megawatt of solar pv on 2,300 low-income apartments.
Heather is the 2016 recipient of the Virginia Commission for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship Award. This exhibition is supported by Progress Rail, A Caterpillar Company, Milliken Infrastructure Solutions, LLC, and Loudoun Stairs.
