Roebling Hall Art Gallery: RoeblingHall.com :: CHELSEA

"Crude"

For Immediate Release

Reception Friday, September 12, 7-9 PM

Hours for the Exhibition: Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday 12-6 PM
September 13th ? October 13th

Roebling Hall is pleased to present ?Crude,? the second New York solo exhibition of the sculptural work of Heidi Cody. Featuring ten illuminated, vacuum-formed plastic and metal signs displaying the abstracted logos of ten of the largest oil companies traded on the NYSE, Cody continues her exploration of the symbology of corporate presence while largely leaving the viewer to decode the polyvalent issues at work in her gleaming sculpture.

Determining the surface area of individual signs according to each oil company?s gross revenues, Cody hints at a familiar hierarchy of money, power and corporate muscle that she both underlines and undermines through her exacting attention to sculptural detail. Consisting of sections of well-known company logotypes, such as Shell, Conoco and Phillips 66, Cody transforms these colorful and potent cyphers into extractions and purifications of their original colorfulness and design.

Heidi Cody?s resulting sculptures mimic and surpass the perfectionism of their sources by improving their desirability, while approaching the somber subjects they represent with something approaching our own ambivalent attitudes. Exceedingly vibrant, refined but yet ultimately recognizable, Heidi Cody?s sculptures tease out a species of redemptive beauty from the most intransigent, imposing, crude commercialism.

Heidi Cody has previously had solo exhibitions at Roebling Hall, Agnew?s (London) Feldman Gallery and Jessica Savage (Portland, OR).

"Philips 66"

Lightbox 2002 from "Big Business"

Born Portland, Oregon
Trained in technical printing as well as fine art, with a work history in commercial advertising graphics, Heidi Cody critiques advertising and commerce with a deep appreciation for the skill and clarity of purpose exercised by its practitioners. Her extractions and purifications of the objects and symbols of corporate presence mimic and indeed surpass the perfectionism that the sources depend on to relay their desirability. Her gleaming, beautiful works approach their objects of concern with our own ambivalent attitudes of awe at their ability of representation and the vertiginous realization of their questionable motives