Alex Heilbron's acrylic paintings @ WAAP explore politics of gender, labour, pattern and technology

“Assembler”
paintings by Alex Heilbron
September 7 to October 12, 2024
WAAP Wil Aballe Art Projects
1129 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
open Thursday to Saturday from Noon to 5pm
Assembler
text by Ashlyn Ashbaugh
0. An assembler is a person who puts a machine or its parts together. 0. For example: a woman stands at an assembly line and bonds tiny wires to semiconductors. 0. Assembler also describes a computer program that converts basic commands into binary code.
1. Heilbron’s paintings repeat a four-petalled flower grid. 1. Translated between computer programs and then onto the canvas by Heilbron’s hand, the grids stretch and warp, frayed by pixelation and slippage.
0. The first machine to use a form of binary code was the Jacquard loom. Punch-cards directed the pins of the loom as it wove intricate patterns. 0. Early computer designs used similar punch-card systems to input data. 0. “The Analytical Engine,” wrote Ada Lovelace of one such design, “weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
1. In three larger paintings rows of opaque circles and patches of glitch interrupt the grid. 1. The painted grid is woven, like brocade cloth, with the ordered density of a motherboard.
0. In the 1940s, IBM employed women “computers” who operated the company’s early punch-card computational machines. 0. Detailed, repetitive, low-wage labor. 0. The word “distaff” means both “spindle” and “women’s work.”
1. Heilbron’s smaller paintings repeat the gridded floral motif at larger scale. 1. Here, opaque circles, or punched holes, partly eclipse the flower’s round centre, while dashes and lines-gestures, maybe, or trailing threads-snag and slash the grid.
0. At NASA, women wove metal wires by hand into the Apollo Guidance System core. 0. Hands thread, twine, twist, plait, bond.
1. Collapsed onto the single plane of the canvas, hole-punch and woven pattern, input and output, code and program collide. They clash and loop. 1. Heilbron assembles, fractures, reassembles.
0. Complex systems break down into small, recursive motions and parts.
1. Out of small, recursive motions and parts, complex systems emerge.
0. 1. Alex Heilbron’s work investigates the conceptual and formal potential of pattern as an index of cultural perceptions of femininity across various social, psychological, and political contexts.
For more information, please visit ...
www.waapart.com/

[@KenMackeff]

Sounds ominous. Looming Jacquard Q+2.

[@PaulpresentsART]

lol ... be careful, it's weaving a cunning plan. 🙂