Banner Ad 468x60

ARTIST STATEMENT AND BIOGRAPHY
Image 300x400

Zhenesse Staniec Heinemann has created live performative dioramas and short character driven video art in New York City for the past five years in varied spaces such as chashama, John Connelly Presents, Collective:Unconscious, Interart Annex, and the Scope Art Fair NY.

Her interest in live art as representational or interactive social experimentation is reflected in both her solo and collaborative shows as well as in her curatorial work such as the eccentrically queer MEAT! in June 2008, and the 40ºPHI project in 2009. Her strong belief in the broad communicative ability of live still visual image and minimal gesture and the exploration of subject through durational performance are explored in work that often interrogates the female figure, cultural means of identity formation, the stability of relations between bodies and objects, and engagement between motivated agents of change.

Zhenesse holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and has been the recipient of a Puffin Grant in 2007 and 2009 (for To Be Titled and the 40PHI: Live Art Expedition respectively), a Scope Grant, and multiple chashama space grants.

STATEMENT:

I am interested in a predominantly metropolitan habituation of myriad glass-fronted worlds accessible, but other. Peering into spaces that we do not occupy we revel in the reflective quality of glass and its ability to encase the display, framing it while protecting - maintaining the boundary and safety of a clear space of outside and in. These boundaries and the allure of the ability for embodiment and disruption of sign with in such a frame draws me to create the confined worlds of Living Dioramas. 

Representation of and estrangement with a model of ecosystem (systems encoded with meaning) and the characters which inhabit it is the core of my work, as well as exploration of the affects on inhabitants confined within an enclosed environment and the act of the gaze on the inhabitant as it evolves over sustained time.  The audience/viewer is asked for an engagement that will enact a transformation through the practice of a sustained gaze.