Carissa Kalia Heinrichs

press release: As the Crow Flies

April 12-27, 2019; Reception: Friday, April 12, 2019; 5-8pm, Tandem Press Apex Gallery, 1743 Commercial Avenue

Hours: Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm; Saturday, 12-4pm

Tandem Press is pleased to host As the Crow Flies, a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition by Carissa Kalia Heinrichs, University of Wisconsin-Madison MFA candidate and 2018-2019 Tandem Press Project Assistant.

Carissa Kalia Heinrichs graduated from Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts with a BFA in Intermedia Art and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a Project Assistant position at Tandem Press. From 2015 to 2016, Carissa was assistant project director to Gallery 224’s ‘Analog Photography: Looking Back and Looking Ahead’ program series for a newly installed public darkroom in Port Washington, WI. In the summer of 2017, Carissa attended the Shiro Oni Artist Residency in Japan and led a public workshop on cyanotype printing. Her work has been exhibited in numerous Arizona and Wisconsin galleries, as well as in New York, the Gunma Prefecture in Japan, and Berlin. Her processes have primarily specialized in experimental printmaking, alternative photographic processes, and fibers.

Carissa Kalia Heinrichs’s current work centers on ways in which we carry one another’s stories in secret. There are stories that are told with no retelling and while they imbue themselves into our identities and into how we see the world, they are outwardly inexplicable. We ourselves become secret. We are unknown. As the Crow Flies contemplates how a secret is kept; how it is retold internally, preserved but mutating, as a re-imagined memory of someone else’s experience. This body of work is an attempt at transcribing muteness.

In As the Crow Flies, Carissa Kalia Heinrichs transcribes muteness through visual codes and methods of erasure. In a suite of etchings created for this exhibition, Heinrichs combines the silhouettes of the Great Lakes with shadows of human limbs. Just as lakes are gaps in the known landscape – their identity prescribed by the surrounding landscapes, yet they are also deemed entirely separate – Heinrichs’s etchings trace a body that is evidenced only by its obstruction. Using land as metaphor, this series likens the way in which a human body is held in a body of water as similar to how water is formed by how it is held by the land. It is a visualization of the secrecy of our presence within a landscape, eliciting thoughts of how we lie/stand/reside within a landscape, how we share its elements, and how we change it in unknown ways. It is a visualization of the process in which stories become secrets.

This exhibition is made possible through support from the Anonymous Fund and the Temkin Foundation.