May 6 - May 28

Opening reception
Saturday, May 6, 5-7pm

Wendy Heldmann
All small stories

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“All small stories” is an exhibition of paintings on the subjects of place, home, and identity that sometimes include people and often do not. Figures are either solidly fixed within their spaces, occupied and distracted, or they have apparently very recently vacated, leaving evidence of their absence and anticipation of their eventual return. This impression that someone has recently departed or is about to arrive amplifies the experience of the empty spaces, which are otherwise full of detail. The paintings take as a starting point the limit of photography and use photos as a catalog of memories to allow for an extended re-addressing of a moment. The vantage takes the broadest possible view of the depicted space, like an establishing shot in cinema. Looking through a doorway or from a far corner of a room, a personal sensibility is cultivated. The titles are usually reflections on and collaborations with poetry, prose, and lyrics, and begin the telling of a story where an interior and its objects become a portrait of the inhabitant/s. 

Wendy Heldmann (b. 1975 Charlotte, NC) is an artist, teacher, and arts administrator currently living in Eugene, Oregon. After studying civil engineering at Cornell University and at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, Heldmann received a BFA in interdisciplinary studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and a master’s degree with distinction in visual art and textiles from Goldsmiths University of London. She was the public programs director and a visual studies faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles from 2002-2012 and has been doing similar work for the University of Oregon’s Department of Art since 2013. Her work has been exhibited nationally in galleries, museums, and non-profit spaces and has been reviewed and published in catalogs, books, and print periodicals including the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Architectural Record, McSweeney’s, and New American Paintings.