Julie Potratz’s work spans across the disciplines of costume design, performance art, photography, and acting. After receiving her BFA in 2008 from the Kansas City Art Institute she went on to be a member of Whoop Dee Doo, a kid-friendly faux public access television show featuring live performances by various local groups and individuals in the community. It is an art extravaganza encouraging audience participation and showcasing the talents of everyone from marching bands to tap dancing grandmas.

 She has also starred in two feature length independent films written and directed by Laurel Nakadate. “Stay the Same Never Change”, a movie shot on location in Kansas City, MO premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. And “The Wolf Knife” starring Christina Kolozsvary and Julie Potratz premiered at the 2010 LA Film Festival. She has exhibited at Roots and Culture and Cabin Exhibitions in Chicago.  She was also an ACRE resident in 2012.  Slow is  a partner gallery of the ACRE Residency program.

(image by Helmut Heiss)

Indian Springs

At the tender age of three, I shared bleachers with ranking military officers as witness to an Air Force flirepower demonstration. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. Fighter pilots dropping bombs on sh**. My hometown was small enough that the military allowed civilians to attend as a kind of entertainment. There was some queue off in the distance, and the jets would scream past the bleachers one after the other. Sheets of flre would flll the air. Some drops would push billows of dust up from the desert floor creating a kind of dust devil lifting a wooden decoy tank, now splinters. Some passes were planes with machine guns mounted on noses, and others would drop paratroopers. I lived in a trailer, as did nearly everyone in the community. About a third of the targets were trailers that looked like my home, or at least one of the neighbors’. The images are etched into memory, and I am still frightened by explosions and flreworks. And thunder.

The Air Force named their ambassador precision fight troupe the Thunderbirds. I witnessed their training literally thousands of times. The Air Force Thunderbirds are the mascot for my High School. They always performed the first air show of the season for us school kids. I sat in the cockpit several times. Later pilots would encourage us to sign up to serve. They were always articulate, sharply groomed, and good looking. Sometimes a rock band of similar blond crew cut men would come to school on the same day as the pilots. During my junior year, I watched three pilots follow the lead in an incorrect loop pattern and dive straight down to the desert pavement. The lead had had a problem with his steering yoke and had taken his hand off the command speaker button in the desperate attempt to fight the jammed control. The other pilots never heard his screamed orders to pull out of the maneuver.

Kill tactics and weapons have changed with the times. My hometown is still training America’s crackerjack killers. The jet is now a drone. Training and live mission control happen in the same place. The drone hovers over the desert where I grew up in the instance of a novice, but over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen in the case of a seasoned bomber.

I no longer live in that desert, but I went home and saw the practice passes. There is that cliché television moment when an adult man returns to his childhood home and things from his grand memory seem small and innocuous. Every pass of a drone triggered that sort of play on my memory. It is a small jet, even a cute jet, that drops small bombs. Perfect for killing a teenage girl in some place we aren’t at war. I imagine the video gamer and his pimples. Are Iraqi boys prone to acne? Are they too busy with guns and prayer to play with joy-sticks? I have to remind myself that my fantasy of cute small bombs is the perfect PR lie for the US military. The Iraqi boys are as likely trying to get food as they are engaged in military training or active operations. The jets are only marginally smaller than the bomber jets seen in my childhood. The weapons dropped by drones are very real, and only sometimes smaller firepower. They offer such a degree of distance and cover that the killing seems like a video game to us onlookers over here. Mistakes, collateral damage, and all the other horrors of dropping bombs are the same horrors bombs always bring. Distance always flattens an image; the unmanned bombers lose a degree of control and precision on the target end in exchange for the safety of the bomber.

Those marketing sub-military grade drones tell us the potential uses are many. They may be harnessed to drop mail or to carry a camera that will record a street transaction. Its lines are futuristic in a way that hovers rather than jets forward. There are promises that drones will be developed to deliver pizza. But right now, drones are the eyes of the city or the fed. And sometimes the muscle.

The drone commanded by Helmut is kinder and gentler. It is likely unfair to push a militant image into your consciousness. No promise of convenience, just the experience of a kind of party delivery service.

I take it back, don’t think of the police. But that’s like asking someone not to think of an elephant and then that’s all they can do. But that’s also the point, right?

Written by Paul Hopkin, responding to Helmut Heiss’ work in the exhibition “Be the party (please don’t go)” at Slow.

Helmut Heiss would like to give special thanks to Philip Kaufmann, Kyle Cronan and Thea Moeller. Heiss’ work was generously sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture.

(images by Helmut Heiss and Emily Severance)

Be the party (please don’t go)

April 6-27, 2013
Opening Reception, April 6, 6-9pm

There are things we dread and rightfully so. Injury, war, disability. Emily Severance and Helmut Heiss expect neither a brave face nor positive thinking. But they each hold out for making something good in situations that seem only dreary. We can tolerate pain, isolation, disappointment and loss more easily if we can also find laughter and pleasure. Neither presumes that finding levity is the same as making the best of things. Laughing doesn’t resolve a root problem, doesn’t make pain go away, doesn’t return something lost. But it fosters humanity.

Emily covers mobility aids with exuberant landscapes. The utility of a walker is left intact, but it within a dreamy vacation vista. Beach and reef prevail, and there is a grand temperate climate to keep our view of beautiful nature well rounded. Her gesture generously offers access to places someone on crutches would struggle to go. But they find themselves inside a fantasy of being there. Continue through literary references and Emily reveals herself as a siren and a tormentor: she’s sung her song in yarn and lured her elderly sailor down to the watery depths.

Emily writes poetry. The poems are about places where we like to go on vacation too. But the poems are about people who went to those places before it was vacation.

Helmut studies the history of a place or a thing before redressing that history. He glosses over unflattering bits like a good pair of jeans, but in a way that gets you to see those bits more clearly. Maybe it has to be all niced up since he sends his art out into the city. People see his art who haven’t planned on seeing it. They may not know it is art, but it isn’t the same boring thing we dull our senses in order to stop seeing every day. 

Helmut’s drone teases; it dares people. Or convinces. He is poking at a hornets’ nest, but he’ll jump at an opportunity to poke at something totally innocuous too. His aim is to get us to re-think things we think we already know.

Both Helmut and Emily really want everybody to think, be aware of the world around us, but they seek in a way that hopes we have a great time in the learning.

Helmut Hess lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He has exhibited throughout Europe and in the US including recent exhibitions in Los Angeles at Elephant Art Space, and Sea and Space, and upcoming shows including the 2013: Liste18, The Young Art Fair Basel on June 16 and 2013: Les Salaisons, Paris. 

Emily Severance has a BA from The Residential College of The University of Michigan and an MFA from SAIC. Orlan has proclaimed her “perfect,” porn star Jack Hammer has treated her to dinner, and Sir Angus Wilson put money in her UNICEF donation box. Her poetry has appeared in several magazines including Boston Literary Magazine, Defenestration, qarrtsiluni, and Sisyphus. She survives the wilds and wiles of Albuquerque by teaching elementary special education.

This exhibition is part of our ongoing partnership with ACRE. Helmut was a resident for their 2012 summer residency. It has also been generously supported by Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture.

(images by George Blaha and Susan Kimball)

Assistant Saws Magician in Half

March 2-30, 2013
Opening Reception, March 2, 6-9pm

George Blaha and Susan Kimball are object makers. They focus on material choices contextualized in architecture and they have learned to really edit, flirting with words like minimal. But their simple shapes and direct processes have stories to tell. George moves through historical references and metaphysical implications fluidly and fluently. Susan evokes emotional connection—housing us in familiar moments so we are left to navigate whether her work is her story or our own.

George sculpts in the digital realm and shows us immaculate prints. It would be simpler for George to make some of his objects in the physical world rather than render convincing surfaces. He has a tendency to ”use” materials that are widely available and inexpensive. His construction is sometimes the antithesis of precise craft. He wryly elevates humble objects by contextualizing them in the vocabulary of oh-so-blue-chip galleries complete with perfect light, perfectly polished concrete floors, and white cube assumptions. Gallery-ness asserts itself with the subtlety that generated its faux neutrality in the first place. George transforms the appearance of his starting point so completely that sometimes it is difficult to recognize his sources. His advanced decorative basket weaving started out patterning Leonardo da Vinci’s signature. Is George claiming to be the better Renaissance man? Evoking a challenge to dilettante aspirations?

Susan grows her work out of a space. Her object pretends it has always lived where it is. But each tells a moment of transitions. Susan’s superpower is her conviction that transitions are mostly awkward. A spandex curtain trapped in concrete teases out a painful first time locker room shower notorious in middle school Phys Ed classes. Why do schools demand that we share our bodies publicly at the height of transitional gawkiness and self-conscious desperation? Susie decorates fat. She taunts boys and conjures Medusa all with frozen vegetables. Well, unfrozen. Unfreezing.

George and Susan are paired together because they tell good stories—which we’re not supposed to do these days. When we push deeper than a cliff note understanding of a story, of a principle, we often scuff the surface and remove a sheen of respectability that comes with unchallenged aphorisms. Susan and George scuff and scuffle with ideas. Not because either sets out to confront, but because they follow their impulses to delve deeper into ideas, follow them through wherever through ends up. Take us all places that otherwise we tend to gloss over.

This exhibition is part of our ongoing partnership with ACRE. Susan Kimball was a resident for their 2012 summer residency.