Drew Heitzler: for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled)

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition in the upstairs gallery of new work by artist and filmmaker Drew Heitzler. Heitzler will present a three channel video installation along with a series of two hundred works on paper.

Heitzler’s work focuses on experimental film, though his multi-disciplinary practice often extends beyond the margins of film and video into installations that include drawing, sculpture, photography, and text. This recent project revolves around the impact of the oil industry in US history as a metaphor for social politics, or rather how each mirrors one another in our culture. Through the frame of Hollywood, Heitzler appropriates and re-edits footage from three films from the sixties, The Wild Ride (1960), Night Tide (1961), and Lilith (1964), to construct a trilogy of abstract narratives, in turn revealing an alternate story of veiled politics and plots. The works on paper further lends to the Heitzler’s practice of reconsidering past ideas that were once only latent or neglected, as he assembles a series of seemingly unrelated found images from various sources that act as clues to re-trace a path, or re-tell a story that was never explicitly told.

Even before they reached the airport, something about the light had begun to go weird. The sun vanished behind clouds which grew thicker by the minute. Up in the hills among the oil pumps, the first raindrops began to fall, and by the time Doc and Shasta got to La Brea they were in the middle of a sustained cloudburst. This was way too unnatural. Ahead, someplace over Pasadena, black clouds had gathered, not just dark gray but midnight black, tar-pit black, hitherto-unreported-circle-of-Hell black. Lightning bolts had begun to descend across the L.A. Basin singly and in groups, followed by deep, apocalyptic peals of thunder. Everybody had turned their headlights on, though it was midday. Water came rushing down the hillsides of Hollywood, sweeping mud, trees, bushes, and many of the lighter types of vehicle on down into the flatlands. After hours of detouring for landslides and traffic jams and accidents, Doc and Shasta finally located the mystically revealed dope dealer’s address, which turned out to be an empty lot with a gigantic excavation in it, between a Laundromat and an Orange Julius-plus-car wash, all of them closed. In the thick mist and lashing rain, you couldn’t even see to the other side of the hole.

Doc and Shasta sat parked by the edge of the empty swamped rectangle and watched its edges now and then slide in, and then after a while things rotated ninety degrees, and it began to look, to Doc at least, like a doorway, a great wet temple entrance, into someplace else. The rain beat down on the car roof, lightning and thunder from time to time interrupting thoughts of the old namesake river that had once run through this town, long canalized and tapped dry, and crippled into a public and anonymous confession of the deadly sin of greed . . . He imagined it filling again, up to its concrete rim, and then over, all the water that had not been allowed to flow here for all these years now in unrelenting return, soon beginning to occupy the arroyos and cover the flats, all the swimming pools in the backyards filling up and overflowing and flooding the lots and streets, all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished, into a sizeable inland sea that would presently become an extension of the Pacific.

Heitzler’s films and film related projects have been exhibited widely internationally, a selection of venues includes, LAX Art, Los Angeles; Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; the Sculpture Center, New York; PS 1, New York; The Project, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Bruxelles, Belgium; and Artists Space, New York. Heitzler (in collaboration with artist Amy Granat) was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He currently has a solo exhibition on view at Renwick Gallery in New York. Heitzler studied at Fordham University, New York, Slade School, London, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, and he received his MA from Hunter College. Heitzler was born in Charleston, South Carolina and lives and works in Los Angeles.