Lonnie, by Daniel Heyman

For this week’s First Friday Focus column, I interviewed Daniel Heyman, one of 17 artists involved with the First Person Festival’s “Shelter” exhibit at the Painted Bride. (It’s not the first time City Paper’s featured Heyman’s work; Drew Lazor wrote a cover story about the artist’s interviews with Abu Ghraib torture victims and the complex work that followed.) For “Shelter,” Heyman visited a veterans’ house in North Philly and created works of art based on his interviews with two previously homeless men whose lives have been affected by war. In case you haven’t picked up a CP yet, here’s a clip:

“I wanted to make sure the project really fit in with my work,” says Heyman. “Since I already have a deep interest in issues surrounding war, and have worked with African-American men on other projects, the veterans house felt like a perfect fit.” For two very different men, Heyman created two very different pieces: Lonnie, a simple, respectful portrait done in gouache ink and pencil on Japanese mulberry fiber paper, and Tony’s Shelter, a tower of symbolic images on plywood, meant to resemble a house of sorts. The distinction with which Heyman represents these men — one stoic, straightforward portrait; one disjointed wood sculpture — is a testament to their individual struggles. “I think from the outside we view people in trouble as all the same,” he says. “But their lives and their personalities couldn’t be more different.”

But Heyman had a lot more to say. Read our Q&A below, and don’t forget that “Shelter” opens tomorrow at the Painted Bride.

Opening reception Fri., Nov. 6, 5-7 p.m., ends Dec. 18, Painted Bride, 230 Vine St., 267-402-2055, paintedbride.org.

Tony’s Shelter, by Daniel Heyman (click for larger image)

City Paper: Why did these men’s stories speak to you?
Daniel Heyman: When I met both Lonnie and Tony, I was interested in each of them because their lives are so different from my own in many ways, but very similar to my own in other ways.  Both of them spent several years of their early adulthood overseas, and these experiences were formative ones, experiences that shaped and directed their lives in ways both forseen and unforseen.  I found this very interesting, especially in the case of Lonnie, who spent years in Asia.  They each had a feeling for instustice, as well, particularly Lonnie, who spoke plainly about the racism he was subjected to in the Army, and how that made him feel.

CP: Have they seen the work? What was their reaction?
DH: I believe that Tony saw the initial print of his portrait on paper, but he has not seen the structure, and I am both curious and nervous about his reaction. Lonnie saw his portrait as it was being done, and I think he liked it.

CP: Lonnie’s piece, in gouache, is hugely different from Tony’s. Why did you choose portraiture, which is much more traditional, for Lonnie? It seems like a very stoic choice, especially in comparison to Tony’s Shelter.
DH: It just happened, I think. I did Tony’s first, and I had the idea of working in a print material. When I was done with it, I regretted not using color as Tony’s face and skin color fascinated me and was so rich in nuance. I think this is why I wanted to paint Lonnie, so I could capture the feel of human skin, or its vibrancy and vitality. … Also, as they are very different people, I really wanted to seperate the artwork and express that these are two people, thrown together out of circumstance, but really with very little in common. I think from the outside we view people in trouble as all the same.  Yes, each of these guys had been homeless before they came to the vets transitional house, but their lives and their personalities couldn’t be more different. Also, and I doubt this was conscious, Lonnie is a generation older, and so out of respect I probably felt I needed a more “grown-up” kind of approach. 

CP: You’ve incorporated text from a torture victim’s testimony in Tony’s Shelter. How did your Abu Ghraib trip and the series of work that followed influence the art you’re making today?
DH: I am still very involved with Abu Ghraib and the abuse of innocent Iraqis in my work, and so it comes into my work in ways such as it did here.  I spent the summer working on a series of nine drypoint chine collee prints I drew in August 2008 in Istanbul of torture victims from Abu Ghraib. A poet friend of mine, who has also been to these interviews with Iraqis, Nick Flynn, took some of the testimonies that I collected in the prints and redacted them into a series of seven poems. Together, the poems and the drypoints make up a portfolio of work that I will present at a show at Swarthmore this spring. I wanted to incorporate one of the poems into Tony’s piece because it is so cryptic, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers, and it speaks specifically to a current war, where young men and women who signed up for service, such as Tony did 30 years ago, are facing tough moral issues that often have no good resolutions.  The poem here is printed in reverse, a happy coincidence, which I think adds to its ambiguity.  Does Abu Ghraib disappear as it recedes in history? Does torture recede because we have a new government? I don’t think things change that fast, and so I wanted to keep that particular issue in the mix.

CP: I’m really interested in the recurring use of eagles for Tony’s Shelter. Specifically, can you explain the meaning behind the sexualized eagle grasping a gun and flowers?
DH: I went to D.C. to sit in on oral argument in one of the Abu Ghraib torture cases being brought by the former detainees. … Behind the bench was a large emblem of the United States, with the U.S. eagle, “spread eagle” clutching arrows in one claw, flowers (or maybe a laurel branch or olive branch) in the other. I am always interested in the meanings behind the visual symbols we use as a society — and this symbol, of a native animal holding arrows (aggression) and branches (a gesture of peace making) seemed very important.  I wanted to refer to this symbol and use it to make my own comments about one facet of our society. Wars are always justified as “just” as required to bring about justice, etc., and here was this very powerful symbol in a court of justice where I had very little hope that justice would prevail. 
I wanted to remake this symbol of our country more like our country, or at least parts of it, as hyper-masculine and threatening, but also very confused, the way our culture is extremely aggressive with rhetoric like “We are going to bomb them back to the dark ages” but doesn’t really know a whole lot about the cultures we attack.  So I gave the bird big testicles and a weird aggressive penis, but also emphatically covered its chest with breasts — kind of like the Venus of Willandorf. The flowers and the gun are self-evident. The court of appeals threw the case out by a vote of 2 to 1, which is now going through an appeal.  Since Tony’s Shelter is in part a piece about military service, I thought I needed this kind of symbol in it somewhere.

CP: You say you created these works while speaking with these veterans. Do you find it easier to conceptualize your ideas visually while listening to a story, in order to bring it to life right there in the moment?
DH: This is only partially true.  I created the copper plate for the etching of Tony’s portrait while I was sitting with him. With Lonnie, of course I started and competed the work during the sitting with Lonnie in his kitchen. The working out of all the other images for Tony’s piece happened over several weeks this summer, and even as late as last week, so no, that piece was really meditated over for a very long time. 

CP: What’s next for you?
DH: I have a show coming up at the List Gallery at Swarthmore which will have several works about Iraqis, both torture victims and victims of the Blackwater/Nisour Square massacre, and portraits of several African-American Philadelphians who sat for me and told me incredibly interesting tales from their lives at the National Comprehensive Center for Fathers in Philly.  It will also have a very large wooden wall, printed with many images that is a kind of meditation again on military recruitment as well as the blindness of our society as to what our military does. A second show next spring at the Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Connecticut will have similar works, but will also have a much larger installation, again made of plywood with etchings printed on the surface.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Arts, Arts Events, First Friday, Gallery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.