Work/Love, new work by Lu Heintz at Carroll House Galleries

October 7-30, 2015

Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 7, 4:00 – 6:00 pm

The Art Department at Keene State College is pleased to present Work/Love, a solo show of new work by Rhode Island artist Lu Heintz, in the Carroll House Galleries from October 7-30, 2015.

Lu Heintz’s latest works question boundaries between work and love. Her sculptural transformations of everyday materials mimic and honor processes of care. The videos enact the dedicated work of relationships in corporeal or strenuous ways – considering the labor of intimacy and the feminization of ‘extra-economic’ work. Heintz uses her own body and personal life, but within a contextual frame that seeks to articulate embodied experience of constructed identity – examining how categories and meanings are socially produced and performed. The work is invested in the notion of cultural performance, and the simultaneity of constructed behavior and personal agency. While some works describe the ways in which labor and love converge in both personal and economic experience, others begin to search for meanings of love that deviate from material conditions and transform the terms of our intimate and collective relations. For Heintz, labor and love act broadly as dual domains that sustain her interest in the ways a subject acts and is acted upon by intersecting social, economic, intimate, emotional and political forces.

Lu Heintz was born and raised in the rural mountains of northern Vermont, and is currently based in Rhode Island. Heintz’s artistic work finds many points of entry –textiles, metalsmithing, video, installation, sound, paper works, and writing. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and is a graduating MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts; she has received awards and honors from the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The International Sculpture Center and was the 2014 recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation’s Promise Award. Her artistic career has coincided with a dedication to DIY activities and social practices including but not limited to: collaboratively edited, independently-published magazines; anti-gentrification organizing; farming and food preservation; herbal medicine; seed-saving; carpentry; collective living; mutual aid; non-institutional educational outreach such as skill shares, workshops and mentoring; feminist Wikipedia editing and feminist reading groups. Her work appears at community gardens, housing projects, offices, and street corners, as well as in national and international museums and galleries.

See her webpage: http://www.luheintz.com/

Print-ready, full color images available upon request. Contact: Johanna.dery@keene.edu

The Carroll House Gallery at Keene State College is located on Main Street, beside the Alumni Center. The hours of the gallery: Wednesday through Saturday, 12-5pm. All Carroll House Gallery events are free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.