Exhibitions: "As Above, So Below" - Philip Heying
Event Details: Friday, Nov. 7, 5 to 8 p.m.
Description:
This exhibition will feature stunning photographs by Matfield Green artist, Philip Heying! We hope you will join us for our opening reception on First Friday, November 7th from 5:00pm – 8:00pm!
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Photographer Philip Heying, born in 1959 in Kansas City, Missouri, developed a passion for photography during middle school, mastering black and white film and print development. After earning a BFA in painting in 1983 from the University of Kansas, he transitioned uniquely to photography after having seen the work of Lewis Baltz and Robert Frank during his senior year.
In Lawrence, Kansas, he formed a significant friendship with writer William S. Burroughs, influencing his shift to photography. In 1985, Philip travelled to Paris and ended up residing there, on and off until 1997, for a total of ten years. The experience of being a foreigner fundamentally informed his photographic practice.
Back in Kansas City for a year in 1986, he began a career in commercial photography, joining the Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography.
Collaborating with Burroughs on a series of collaged paintings in 1987, he exhibited his own work in Paris in 1988 with a solo show at Galerie Agathe Gaillard, leading to a residency at the Cartier Foundation and sales in France. Since that show he has consistently exhibited his work internationally.
Returning to the U.S. in 1997, he worked as an assistant for Irving Penn for four years, eventually undertaking his own freelance editorial photography career based in Brooklyn by 2001. He maintained friendship with Penn until his passing in 2009. During these years, he also worked closely with Joel Meyerowitz making guide prints for Meyerowitz’s book “Tuscany: Inside the Light” in 2003.
In 2010, he completed the book project "CODE" and a series titled Unimproved Land Northeast Kansas. From 2010 to 2019, Philip taught at Johnson County Community College and had examples of his work acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's permanent collection.
In 2019, he finished "A Visual Archaeology of the Anthropocene," addressing human influence on the environment. He then moved to Matfield Green, Kansas. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, focusing on his photography of the tallgrass prairie. His current project, "A Survey of Elemental Gratitude," explores grassland ecology's enduring vitality and the hope it might imply for the future.
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EXHIBITION STATEMENT:
Without the space of the Great Plains, our imaginations would be deprived of a potent metaphor for possibility, abundance, and resilience. To spend time living in a grassland is to become subliminally connected to the central alchemical idea: As above, so below. The intermingling of forms, the echoes and symmetries of processes that determine and permeate these forms, are constantly apparent. Citizens of the prairie become intimate with otherwise unfathomable temporal and spatial scales.
Over this infinitely complex and interdependent tapestry of life, modern human industry has imposed a Cartesian grid, defined by capital. Borders and property lines only serve to constrain certain economic and cultural activities. Ownership is entirely a cultural construct. Its enforcement requires the constant threat of violence. The modern era of the Great Plains is, in some ways, characterized by barbed wire. As Teju Cole has pointed out, “There is no such thing as an innocent photograph of the American landscape.” Ownership implies, in part, a history of genocide and dispossession, death and life.
Walking this land leads me to feel a visceral connection to the lives that faced this dreadful history. I am now living in the place where this happened. At the same time I feel this connection, it also represents an impenetrable chasm between my life and the lost knowledge that led to its creation. What does it take to live in a place, as an integral part of the life of that place, without depleting it? I find myself trying to imagine what such a life would be like and trying to create photographs that feed such imaginings.
We need new stories about our place in the world and how we act in it. These new stories need to shift our values to be inclusive of all the things we currently only consider as “externalities.” I intend my pictures of the prairie to symbolically evoke the fundamental ground from which we evolved, as a basis for reimagining our interactions with the world and each other, at a time when humanity is critically stressing planetary boundaries in ways that pose severe risks. I believe this is a matter of utmost urgency. We are inundated with news of catastrophe and with dystopian cinematic visions of the future, yet images of a future that is vibrant, resilient, and beautiful are far less common. While exploring the region around my home, I’ve come to understand it as containing visual evidence for the irrefutable reality of great promise, — if only we are willing to expand our imaginations and recognize our connection to its vitality.
