PAST EXHIBITIONS:

HEATHER CANTRELL

Opening Reception Thursday, April 15, 6-8 PM

SUITE 106 Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Heather Cantrell.

Corpus Battaglia is a series of photographs, which encompass imagery from both public and private histories.

The macabre settings of battlefields are part of Cantrell’s Grand Guignol fascination with the interplay between gruesome past and spectral present into a wholly unified and highly personal group of photographs.

Combined here are two sets of source imagery: the mausoleum-still offerings of the Gettysburg, Antietam, and Valley Forge battlefields, and the iconic assembly of the artist’s“four fathers” (a pun too sinful to employ) the four previous husbands of her mother, each of whose influence runs as deep as the waters of the Ohio through Cantrell’s confederate upbringing. Heather Cantrell’s Corpus Battaglia tracks such phantasmal beings through the overt expectation of some of their typical haunts, here discovered in a litany of American battlefields, commemorative Civil War statues, and autobiographical portraits of her successive family patriarchs and mementos thereof. On previous photographic excursions, Cantrell has often trained her camera’s eye on enigmas of the macabre and visages of recondite power, projects through which initial appearances of unremarkable quietude are ultimately destabilized by poison draughts of brooding and dread.

Only her birth father finds his human shape; the other patriarchs, like their forebears whose own blood nursed the nascent Republic, have evacuated the mortal coil in favor of an eternal memory, now engraved in the objects and domiciles left in their stead. One image, perhaps the exhibition’s most chilling moment, attempts to capture a fleeting nuance of Cantrell’s second father Sam, a recent suicide victim, in the stupefying simplicity of the ceramic Hallmark vase which holds his mortal remains. Somehow, this uneven assembly of Southern men-- or of their monumental stand-ins—becomes eerily entwined with the landmarks of American warfare.

Heather Cantrell graduated from UCLA in 2001. Her work has been exhibited at 4_F Gallery in LA, Printed Matter and CCA Wattis institute among others.