Alexander Heilner

Aerial Landscapes

January 3 - February 27, 2014

Most of my artwork over the past twenty years has been the result of my ongoing obsession with the integration of the organic and the artificial in all areas of our human experience. I am incorrigibly drawn to fringe landscapes where human development is colliding with natural phenomena. Sometimes this is on a grand (or even grandiose) scale, as people build huge artificial islands or consume entire segments of the earth's resources. At other moments I find myself closing in on the particular and the delicate, as I watch a solitary leaf slowly emerges from under fresh paint on a city street. Most recently, my aerial photography has taken up a long-simmering interest in the unintentional mark-making we lay across the land, in the form of our ever-expanding infrastructure.

Interwoven with this conceptual thread is my strong faith in the transcendent power of beauty. I am not shy about finding and relaying the formal allure that so often seems to surprise us when the wildness of nature aligns with the structured, orthogonal world of the human-built. I have been known to make special trips across the country, or even around the world to photograph something very specific or dramatic in this vein. But more often, I find my subjects closer to home, in the rusting marshes of New Jersey's Meadowlands, or in the scruffy hills behind Los Angeles housing developments. In fact, it is these everyday places that really dig in over time, and come to tell us the most about how we live with our surroundings.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Alexander Heilner is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in photography, video, digital imaging, installation, lighting design, and sculpture. His work has been exhibited, screened, and performed nationally and internationally, from MoMA to Burning Man. In 2012, he won the prestigious Baker Artist Prize and his work was featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The same year, Alex’ commissioned digital collages were featured in the new Johns Hopkins Hospital complex, andBaltimore magazine named him the city’s best photographer.

Most of Alex's photography consists of color landscapes. He is obsessed with the relationship between artificial and natural elements within the environment, and within our culture. His recent aerial photography has taken him to an array of locations around the U.S. and the world, looking at the infrastructure and other marks humans unwittingly paint across the earth's surface. Alex has recently begun a long-term collaborative project to document Arctic communities that are in flux due to climate change.

In addition to his fine art work, Alex works selectively in photojournalism and commercial photography, taking on print and web projects that hold particular interest for him. His work has been featured in National Geographic, JPEG, Details, and the website of public radio's Marketplace. Nearly 200 of Alex’ photographs are featured in the 2010 Encyclopedia of New York City.

Alex earned his B.A. at Princeton University and his M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has been teaching photography at MICA / The Maryland Institute College of Art since 2003, and currently serves as the Associate Dean of Design and Media at MICA. Previously, Alex taught photography and digital imaging at NYU, as well as film and video production at SVA. He has also served as the director of the photography program at the JCC in Manhattan. https://heilner.net/