Patricia Heal - Heavenly Creatures - 2001

The Robin Rice Gallery announces a solo exhibition of photography by Patricia Heal. The opening reception will be held on Wednesday March 14, 2001, from 5:30 to 8:30. The show will run through April 28, 2001.

In this collection of three preternaturally serene images of recumbent female nudes, Patricia Heal explores the boundary between the soothing and the shocking. While all three photographs take the elegant form of elongated rectangles, two, enlarged to 16-feet in length, are gargantuan. They are mounted on opposite walls of the gallery like huge, floating aquariums and are the show’s center.

In recent work by such artists as Lisa Yusgavage, the nude has been reclaimed and repositioned as grotesque and lurid. Heal’s enormous supine figures, on the other hand, are majestic and ethereal. Bathed in darkness and backlit to evoke lunar lighting, their long undulating forms summon peaceful, mythic landscapes.

The color variations, from the undersea hues of the invitational piece Sister Moon to the warmer tones of another work, Awaken, offset the dark skin tones of Heal’s models, who are woman of color. All three images share Heal’s characteristically flat, scumbled surfaces that result from an in-camera technique that creates a sense of artifice and heightened texture. Such soothing sensations, however, exist in tension with the works’ shocking elements: their overwhelming scale and their unflinching depiction of the body from a still life perspective, as glorious terrain.

Born in England where she studied art and drama, Patricia Heal came to the United States in the early 1980Õs to receive a degree in photography from the Ohio Institute of Photography in Dayton. Following her graduation, Heal settled in New York City where she currently works as a commercial photographer. She is a recipient of several awards including The Communication Arts Photography Award, a Nikon/Photo District News Award and a Fuji Film promotion award. Her recent clients include Martex, Lenox, Talbots and House and Garden, City and New York Magazines. This is her third solo show at The Robin Rice Gallery.