UStrust
SR is pleased to present UStrust,
Eric Heist's fourth solo show with
the gallery. Through his past shows,
Heist has developed an increasingly
allegorical voice in which his
life as an artist, and art making
in general, stand in for the larger
institutions that shape all our
lives. For this show, Heist has
created a fictional corporation,
a bank named UStrust, with the
bank itself as the site where the
individual attempts to come face
to face with the faceless corporation.
The installation mimics
a bank's interior, including variations
on a teller window, posters, crowd control
stanchions, cubicle partitions, video
surveillance. In the bank lobby, painting-like
felt-covered panels adorn the walls in
UStrust's corporate colors of black and
blue and transform the typical workplace,
the cubicle, into a flattened, uninhabitable
corporate sign. In a series of advertising
posters, images from the artist’s relatively comfortable
life – a supermarket, the workplace,
home, car, and bank – are interwoven
with texts from the poverty-stricken in
the United States. These appropriated texts
become open, less tied to the actual feelings
of invisibility expressed by the poor than
to an existential fear in the artist and
viewer. This theme of invisibility flows
through the show: A teller window reflects
the viewer in black. Video footage of a
failed robbery depicts the artist in front
of this same window, humbled by his inability
to get past his own reflection. This situation
is complicated by a post-robbery act of
vandalism in which the teller window has
been spray-painted by a reversal of the
corporate name: "UStrust" becoming
a sardonic command, “trust us." The
final act of invisibility is depicted in
a life-sized diorama: a black dais at the
center of the gallery, surrounded by incandescent
black-lights and black, velvet ropes – a
negative stage on which lies a dead, draped
body.
This corpse at the center of the show
startles. But it startles not because it
is morbid but because it is funny. Read
autobiographically, the artist is this
slain martyr on stage, having heroically
died for his art in the face of the world's
indifference. What is refreshing about
Heist's autobiographical impulse is that
it lacks narcissism. Aware of his own feelings
of powerlessness, aware of lording corporations,
aware that there are those worse off and
those better off than he, Heist neither
descends into self-pity nor self-rightousness.
Instead, he acknowledges his place in a
complex network of consumption, a network
in which the artist's desire to pursue
the transcendent can not and should not
break free from the context that makes
such questions meaningful.