Review of Jay Heikes Inanimate Life :

Upon entering the Marianne Boesky Gallery, I was met with the familiar apathetic stares by the lackey behind the desk, a common occurence almost ritual at this point . I usually try and read the perceived success of the pieces on display by the character of the gallery employees and from their expressions I could see they were less than impressed. I however was very much impressed by the animate, voluminous sculptures at the gallery. The first piece I encountered entitled Prickly, Sickly, and Thickly, was a long tubular wooden shaft adorned with various quills and spikes from what I could only imagine are porcupines. These towering pillars seemed reminiscint of the pillars at St. Peters altar in the Vatican the artist write up describes Hienke as attempting to create inanimate life forms. The may serve as the founding pillars of his new biological Kingdom. Observed in the round the pillars are threatening, but not extensively so, it at once draws in and rejects the viewer. They appear insect like penetrating the gallery floor, like something out of a wonderfully bad Dune rip off.
The influence of Biological descriptions was extremely apparent in Heartless Ascension, here Hieke conjoins corroded iron and Bronze in the vein of Louis Bourgeois spiders. The figure however appears more languid then Bougeois' sturdy monsters on one side a long iron bar is melted to resemble a rope or a tail. The sculpture itself, according to the write up produces a corrosive energy akin to a dying battery. This may symbolize the decay inherent in modern post-industrial life, as resources dwindle. The piece, which, at some angles looks like a mosquito is for me a depiction of Ginsburg's Moloch, the terrible sprit of industry, whose methods expose the arbitrariness of matter and put (relatively) static elements through an infinite process of creation/destruction.
Hieke's third and I believe most successful work called Molting, was a series of giant skin like silver fragments on the gallery floor. According to the write-up the forms are intended to resemble the shedding of Histories baggage and the potential for new life. I find this description too simplistic. The delicate pieces, due to their location on the floor, are less prominent than his more solid sculptures. They, however, embody the ethos behind his work. Heike it seems, is obsessed with decay and time, I see Molting less a personification of change but of the cohesion of memory and time. Skin flakes are the perfect sign for memory in the face of times endless movement. OUr conception of the present is always influenced mainly by memory which appears as thin and malleable as a dry membrane.
This Conception of molting is Directly related to Battleship Potempkin, a large Photographic collage of secenes from the 1925 Eisenstein film. The Write up claims the piece is about the Postmodern struggle to combine fragments of time into cohesive historical unity. A task that is , no doubt, rendered impossible by subjectivity.