ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER
24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana
March 26 - April 9, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery | Glassell Park
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce 24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana, an exhibition of new paintings by Andrea Joyce Heimer that will run from March 26 - April 9, 2022 at our Glassell Park gallery, located at 2700 W Ave 34, Los Angeles, CA, 90046. 24 Hours aggregates twenty-four 30”x40” paintings that represent each hour of the day Heimer lost her virginity.
Poignancy and humor imbue Heimer’s serialized narrative, centered on the encounter that made Heimer “a woman, albeit a disappointed one,” as she writes in her statement on the series. But the virginity loss itself, which occurs at noon, is depicted with restraint. Within the painting, it is relegated to a small section of a busy composition that otherwise teems with life and activity—his grandmother knitting on the floor above the young couple, planes flying in the sky above her, geese pecking at her garden beyond. And within the series as a whole, sex itself is diminished by the sheer quantity of other exuberant moments, like the 9 A.M. hustle and bustle of the school ground. The expected catharsis brought by what is so commonly trafficked as the watershed moment of young adulthood for women is but one of many features in this intricate portrait of a day.
Heimer’s painterly style evokes narrative friezes, wherein each work’s composition is segmented into a series of layers that depict various planes of action. Her approach to perspective borrows from techniques of pre-modern image-making, abandoning illusionistic space for narrative condensation. The importance of narrativity—of what Heimer’s paintings communicate, and how—is reflected in her work’s titles. The titles are long, expository, and heartfelt, constituting a confessional writing practice that runs parallel to her painting. For instance, the painting representing her virginity loss is titled: 12:00 p.m.: During the peak of the chinook my boyfriend and I cut school to make out in his grandmother’s cement basement, in the house near the truck stop. She is infirm and can’t make it down the stairs. My boyfriend wants to have sex, which would make this my first time, and I say no and yes back and forth because I am afraid of getting pregnant but I also want my boyfriend to love me forever. He decides for me and I yelp at the surprise of it all. I guess now I am a woman.. The titles read like diary entries, and impart upon each work a sense of predestined dread not immediately legible in the painting. For example, Heimer titles a work depicting male figures engaged in a snowball fight amid a snowy landscape 7:00 a.m.: Inexplicably, I wake up depressed. I am late for school. It is cold but a warm purple wind tussles my ponytail and I know this means a chinook will melt away some of the snow this afternoon. Two idiots pummel each other with snowballs while they still can. Images that might otherwise be read with a sense of cozy comfort turn acerbic when framed by Heimer’s titles.
Though 24 Hours is a conceptually unique project, Heimer has long used experiences from her own life to explore the underbelly of human emotion, most frequently depicting the various shades of loneliness. But while her subjects experience pain, jealousy, isolation, and — in the case of 24 Hours — an acute disappointment that is destined to be repeated, her paintings remain full of humans, animals, homes and hills, full of a heartening interest in a deeply interconnected world.
Andrea Joyce Heimer (b. 1981, Great Falls, MT; lives and works in Ferndale, Washington) received her MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her work has been exhibited at the Missoula Art Museum, Missoula; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Kasmin Gallery, New York; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Colombo Gallery, Milan; CG2 Gallery, Nashville; Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation award and a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award.
Artist’s Statement
24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana is a pictorial blow-by-blow of the day I lost my virginity. I was fifteen, lonely, and, being an adopted child, felt like some strange invasive species everywhere I went—something that patently did not belong but over time was seen as part of the landscape. I was desperate to find what I thought of as love and found something like it in a troubled boy who lived with his grandmother in a shabby house by a truck-stop. He only went to school when he felt like it and was a braggart. I was sold on his cheekbones.
We did the deed in his grandmother’s musty basement, even though I tried to back out at the last minute. It didn’t matter, it was done and it was terrible. The basement was cold and dank and I remember looking up at the cobwebs in the rafters and not knowing I deserved, at the very least, for it all to have happened above ground. I look back at that day and think that’s where the trouble began. Of course it’s not that simple, but those twenty-four hours were formative. I still find myself downstairs when I should be up.
It’s been twenty-five years since that day in the basement and I am navigating a divorce. The last two months have been a marathon of paperwork, boundary setting, and severing of all sorts of things. I think a lot about timelines of events and how we organize them in our minds. I think maybe in rewinding the relationship I could find the hitch in the timeline, to avoid it somehow in the future. The divorce timeline is too fresh to revisit right now but I am ready for pain. And so I return instead to the timeline of where the trouble really began, that day in the basement when I was fifteen.
24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana begins at 1:00 a.m. on a snowy December morning on a highway outside Great Falls, Montana. Each 30” x 40” painting represents an hour in the day, passing through scenes of me and my family asleep and dreaming, hunters ice-fishing in the wee hours. Another morning panel sees me going to school then skipping out early to follow my boyfriend to his grandmother’s basement, where I became a woman, albeit a disappointed one. The following panels track my movements through the graveyard to confess what I’d just done, and my subsequent descent into a waking nightmare about what I now was, how my body was changed, and how I would be seen.
Toward the end of the timeline I tell my best friends all about what happened and show them the blood, not knowing my boyfriend would soon break into my sister’s car to steal her stereo. In the last panel the same highway takes us out of town past a pack of wolves surrounding a pastured cow. The light and weather shift throughout the twenty four panels. December in Montana is very cold and snowy but a chinook had rolled through town that day—sudden warm winds that momentarily melted the snow, before the sun set and froze everything again. That is one of the strongest memories of that day - the cold and darkness of the morning blasted away by a fit of heat in the afternoon, followed by a return to freezing temperatures. The frigid stillness of that night was made all the more punishing by that burst of midday heat, a weather fluke that could never last - not in that season, not on those plains, not on that day.
- Andrea Joyce Heimer