Site-specific installation by SALLY HELLER

In a new large-scale site-specific installation, New Orleans based artist Sally Heller is taking over the back galleries at ACAC. Working in colorful found industrial materials, Heller makes immersive environments that transport audiences to an alien wasteland in a state of rainbow apocalypse. 

EX-Tabula RASA is an exercise in transmutation. A modern-day cultural hacker and urban archaeologist, Heller assembles mundane materials and cultural debris to create new realms that unbalance the relationships between macro and micro, man-made and organic, permanent and fragile. Heller uses plastic remnants, construction netting, articles of clothing, and cast-off toys, ripped from their usual context, to weave together an environment in abstract. A piece of a sweater becomes an opaque skin pulled taut and dense, while heavy rope above appears weightless. Rather than hiding the previous life of these things, Heller creates a winking subversion of what these materials were destined for, as an allegory for the tenuous state of our actual environment.

EX-Tabula RASA, is part of the Independent Projects program at Alabama Contemporary. Permanent sculptures by Heller include a public sculpture installed in downtown New Orleans, funded by a 2008 Joan Mitchell grant and a stainless steel sculpture commissioned by a private collector. She has been awarded residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy, the Vermont Studio School, Johnson, Vermont and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. She holds a BS from University of Wisconsin and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited at the Lawndale Art Center, Houston, the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Depauw University, Indiana, Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, Montserrat College of Art, Massachusetts, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, Ohio State University, Athens, Ohio, Kemper Fine Art, New York City, Louisiana Museum of Science and Art, Baton Rouge, Moore College of Art, Pennsylvania, and Scope, Miami. Recently she had a solo show at Memphis University Art Gallery and at Tulane University, both where she worked with art students. 

OPENING DURING NOVEMBER ARTWALK

November 11 @ 6 PM

This exhibition is supported in part by Mobile Baykeeper‘s Reduce the Use Grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program. Mobile Baykeeper is raising awareness about litter and marine debris through the sponsoring of meaningful artworks, which are meant to highlight an omnipresent problem and serve as a monument to our fight against litter. Seeing and working with the problem is a great way to bring attention to the issue.

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: