A couple rather fun things on her website: the inclusion of a sketchbook of sorts and a gallery of art made by her as a child. The Baby Art gallery starts with an image predicting Beth’s later career path and continues with a lovable selection of crayon drawings.

The sketchbook is much more varied. I think that it will be done through wordpress later, but for know it’s an insanely packed html page full of scanned drawings, some paintings that weren’t included on other pages for whatever reason, collages, and even a fair amount of notes in the margins. I have the ability to see into her head more often than most, but even with that I’ve found some stuff in here I haven’t seen before.

Definitely worth a look.

And with that, we’re wrapping up Elizabeth Heppenstall Week. I’ve got a lot of other stuff I need to post about this upcoming week. Some features, some deadlines. You know, the usual. Hope you’ve enjoyed Beth’s work! Feel free to send her an email letting her know what you think, or subscribe to her blog for updates. I’m sure I won’t be able to resist posting more in the future.

I’ve also got Permanent-Stick-It-Out-Ed-Ness on my page, but Beth posted the headshots from that project as Professional Photography. The intention is to get more pictures made of alternate personas at a later date. I find it enlightening to see how portrait studios react to you when you are not yourself. It’s like punk’d for those interested in social photography.

While Having A Baby is full of the dirty and rough side of photography (which currently makes my world go round), Beth has done a fair amount of lit work as well. A lot of these shoots seem to be research for her paintings, but a few of her portraits have been posted in a gallery called Space Boys and Other Oddities.

At times I feel like a lot of studio work looks the same – lighting can be interesting, but gets predictable for some reason. I think that Beth’s pictures have a strong female gaze, though, which is something I enjoy. It’s probably not as strong as her crazy-goggles, but it’s there.

If there is one thing I’d have to hope for in the future, it’s greater variety of models. Beth suffers a little from a common early artist phenomenon: you can recognize repeated of faces in her work. It’s not as bad as many photographer’s websites, where all the pictures seem to be taken in one lazy afternoon, but if it continued in that direction I think it might take something away from the impact of some of the projects. As she gets less shy and more confident in her creative abilities, this will shift drastically. Of course, having her name out there a little bit more helps and being able to point potential subjects to her website is never a bad thing.

Today I’m posting about a couple of Beth’s little installation projects.

The first you may know about already (I think a couple of my readers are actually in it). Called Fashion Face, it started with a little call for people to send in pictures of themselves making their best model face. Beth curated those, along with a few pictures taken on the street with a digital camera. Then she added in a couple appropriated images for good measure, printed each picture out as a one foot square and hung them as a grid. Under the images was a boombox playing a runway mixtape. It was simple and lowtech but surprisingly effective. Everyone who saw the piece at Alexander Hall seemed very amused.

This video, under the title Plant Sneak on her website, is a proposal for a projection based installation (though I’m honestly not sure installation is the best way to refer to this kind of thing.) There’s probably less social critique involved in this one – though I’m sure someone could find it. Just a bit of pop culture inspired absurdist fun. I don’t think Beth has been able to get her hands on a high powered projector yet (needed for outdoor work like this), but I’m sure she will someday.

These images are from a little calender Beth made featuring – you guessed it – animals with human like faces.

I think the calender itself will be available at some point.

No, she’s not pregnant. Having A Baby is the title of a strange little photo series she completed earlier this year. The title is a reference to the cliché idea that creating art is like birthing a child, but it’s also poking fun at the mass perception of women artists, especially photographers. Based on the title alone, most people in the male dominated photo world would groan – “not yet another woman documenting her children, her pregnancy, etc.”

Beth’s title anticipates this attitude on behalf of her art world peers. And then it slaps it back at them with one of the most odd-ball, creative, metametameta groupings of pictures I’ve seen on the net in a long time. (Beth cautioned me here, while I was talking to her previously: “I don’t want anyone looking too hard for these ‘meta’ connections. They might not enjoy the pictures.”)

It seems that while I was busy finishing my photo degree, worrying about consistency or trying to finally throw off the weight of obsessing about technique, Beth was quietly taking pictures with her cell phone, point and shoot nikon, a holga, my borrowed rolleicord, her old slr, a camera she found in a garage, even a little mermaid digital camera (less than one megapixel.) They were all dropping into one big folder to be edited down later.

Connections made, inferences, little jokes, outright attacks on the viewer, on the medium, on expectations. I expect many viewers will not understand what excites me about this gallery. I’m not sure I understand, but I keep laughing.

Many of these photographs carry the same strangeness as her painting, odder perhaps because of their undeniable link to life. Some of them, like the one below, directly reference painting of the past while trying to throw off the hip connotations of their own medium (A holga rothko?).

Take some time and look through it in order. I’m tired and I have trouble expressing how amazing I find this gallery.

The mixed media, photography, and electronic work is actually relatively new for Beth. Judging by the debris around our room, her primary medium is paint. At least, for our purposes, I’m placing ink washes and such under this category.

If you visit our house, you will see a plethora of paintings. Many are figure studies, finely worked nudes and masterfully rendered drapery. Beth has the skills to make a salable portrait, and I’ve seen her put hours into copies of ancient masterworks.

However, judging by the pieces she decided to place online, classic technique is far from her mind. She seems more interested in limits, the limits of paint, the edge of her perception. Many of the pieces she cherishes the most were made in shockingly short periods of time, especially when considering the trials of the medium. These two, from the gallery simply titled Paint, are obviously explorative. Others in the gallery are inquests into her anxieties and celebrations of her obsessions. Classic craft is a tool to be twisted or gleefully ignored.

This image, from her Mash Ups set is a fine example of a series of small canvases that have lately been stashed around the bathroom and hallways. They are inspired, I think, by our horribly textured walls, which Beth stares at for hours, finding animals and demons, faces and constellations. Again, exploration – no such work could be precisely pre-conceptualized.

The gallery Ask A Grown Up showcases a slightly more conventional series. The copy work here is unfortunately lacking, these pieces are much more attractive offline (I’ll be helping with this soon, I’m sure. I bet we can make em look better on the site).

These are children Beth has had a hand in raising, her two much younger siblings and a pair she often cares for while their parents are away. On the cusp of adulthood, they may be eager to leave childish things behind (or in the background as it were, har.)

These are my interpretations, of course, and in a curt manner. There’s a lot to be found in her brush touched works. She tells me more will be online very soon. One I’ve seen – a portrait of our landlord’s dog, a Chihuahua, towering god-like over a quaint European landscape.

I’m kicking off this mega-feature with Boys. These are my absolute favorites of all her creations. They rank extremely high among everything I’ve seen, period. I could talk at length, but I’ll spare you. A celebration of the history of art, a hilarious feminist visual battery, and damn fine use of my favorite lowbrow medium, the animated gif. Genius.

When I first saw these presented, they were projected a little bit larger than life size. You can view them larger at her site.

Beth and I have been very close for some time. We first dated during her freshman year of college. Our first collaborative installation and opening was in early 2008. Later that year we moved in together. We recently celebrated the one year anniversary of that move (not to mention her 22nd birthday this past September 24th.) My photographs of her from The Ones We Love have just been published in Issue 20 of JPG Magazine.

Now I’m dedicating a week to celebrating her work and the launch of her website. Allowing that I am just about as biased as any one person can be, know that Elizabeth Heppenstall is one of my absolute favorite artists. She understands that I won’t hesitate to tell her when I think something she does sucks (same goes for just about anyone), but I also have the benefit of knowing how she thinks – sharing similar aesthetic sensibilities and (often more importantly, with her work) sense of humor.

Obviously, this is the epitome of nepotist blogging, which is why it is my preference to keep this a personal blog, as much as I write about other topics and feature a wide variety of people I don’t know and have never met. While there are very very many talented artists out there, we rely on our friends to support us, especially when we are just starting out and no one else knows our name, never mind actually making it to our shows. So, I don’t feel any guilt over devoting time and space to my loved one: almost all of this work has never been seen before on the internet.

It is my absolute pleasure to introduce it.

www.behepp.com

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