Working across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it.  Heydt’s layered imagery conflate time and place, colliding and merging generations of possibilities, and disrupting logical relationships between occurrences.  Through her unique manner of expression, she presents a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line, one marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds. The uncertainties and inevitabilities of which are drowned out by the the white noise of the media and the empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. Combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for. 

Side Effects

There is no truth to search for, but an illusion to deconstruct. The Cartesian gap between desire, memory and reality accounts for the mutability of history. In its inexhaustible invention of deduction and speculation, the medium of film is nothing more than a chemically processed imprint causally connected to reality- bound to neither truth nor objectivity, but the subjective and universal. Images serve as stand-ins yielding mental copies of the external world we’ve grown increasingly estranged from. The medium has swallowed the message.


She Bruises Cold

Heterotopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces… disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming.


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Samantha L Heydt