“It must touch me, if it does not touch me it is not art, to me, I do not think,” stated Heide Hatry at a private artist talk with Professor Leonard Schwartz and his poetry students from The Evergreen State College as she discussed her newest piece of work, The Rust Room. It is Hatry’s belief that beyond any entity of endowed entitlement, any given economic value, and exceeding the standards set and the reviews published depicting a piece of work, it cannot be art unless it “touches’ the viewer. Art, as Hatry states it, must “touch” or trigger someone, positively, negatively, emotionally, or mentally, but it must move a viewer.
Hatry’s statement coincides this theory directly to her current work, The Rust Room, where she hopes to create the sensation that one is entirely submersed in art rather than solely viewing it. In Undercurrent Projects, an artist run space in the East Village, Hatry constructed this piece of work. Complete with walls, a floor, a ceiling, a table, a chair, and a chandelier, as well as shelves embellished with nick-nack oddities such as small horse figurines, candle holders, spherical objects possessing unknown meaning, a mirror, books, a slightly disfigured baby doll, and other pieces of meaningful randomness. The totality of this contains the sensations of change, inevitability, time, and decay; all of which are made quite prominent as the rooms and the entirety of its contents are coated in a thick layer of rust – the figurines and random oddities as well as the floor and ceiling and everything else had found themselves encased in a chemical change, forced to carry on through a process where the end result is nothing near prosperity.
When entering the room one is asked to look around and view the contents (which also includes a rusted painting of a John Keats poem) by the candlelight of real burning candles resting in the rusted chandelier hanging above the viewers head. They then must close the sliding doors on either side and sit for a moment, allowing the art to consume the viewer, for Hatry sets it up in such a way that rather than the piece of art have an audience where the eyes devour the art, the piece of art instead receives a visitor. It is at this point, when one is sitting in the room that they will receive the opportunity to, as Hatry states it, have the art “touch” them. It is at this opportunity that one is able to receive all of the qualities of the small room and see if it stimulates the viewer in some way.
Along with Heide Hatry’s new project on display in Undercurrent Projects is a miniature retrospect of some of Hatry’s previous works. Photographs of pieces from her projects Skin, Heads and Tales, and Not a Rose touches on topics such as awareness, identity, death, comfortability and other matters as she works with animal products in order to sculpt her pieces. Two of these sculpture projects pertain people used with the meat medium, and the third uses the meat to construct flowers. Videos delving into each of the projects as well as one touching on Hatry’s previous room she had constructed (The Skin Room) are also on display.
In quite a controversial atmosphere Heide Hatry manipulates natural processes in order to expand the mentality of art, to make the idea prominent that art it not only something meant to be viewed, or adored for pleasant aesthetics, but also because art is something meant to be felt. She truly accomplishes this by placing her audience in such intimate relations with her work and provides the experience of being entirely surrounded by art.
Artist Bio: Hatry is from Southern Germany where she grew up on her father’s pig farm. Later she attended multiple art schools and studied art history at the University of Heidelburg. Hatry also taught at a private art school in Germany for fifteen years. Then in 2003 Hatry chose to move to New York City where she then began to curate numerous exhibitions in Germany, The United States, and Spain. Hatry has published three books Skin, Heads and Tales, and Not a Rose as well as edited over two dozen books and art media.
Heide Hatry’s show The Rust Room will be on display at the artist run space Undercurrent Projects located @ 215 E 5th St, NYC, and is running from April 29th – May 27th
By: Alyx Sellars