Andrea Joyce Heimer: Neither Here Nor There

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Andrea Joyce Heimer, “Everyone Everywhere On All Sides Knows Where To Go. I Don’t Know Where To Go, I Am Stuck In Between. Where Is Everyone Going? I Am The One In Yellow, Standing Still,” 2022

acrylic and oil pastel on panel (courtesy of the gallery)

The Centre of International Contemporary Art Vancouver is excited to announce our upcoming exhibition, Andrea Joyce Heimer: Neither Here Nor There.

Andrea Joyce Heimer (b.1981) is an American artist born in Billings, Montana, and lives in Bellingham, Washington. Heimer’s painting and drawing practice investigates the subject of loneliness—largely informed by autobiographical stories such as her own adoption—in order to examine the human experience of loneliness and the subtle transitional moments between states. Heimer’s paintings are reminiscent of frescos or narrative tapestries, with a unique perspective that deconstructs characters, landscapes, and time. Accompanying the orderly pictures of the vertical and horizontal, the paintings read like journal entries, with long anecdotal titles and colourful tableaus, intersecting the intensely personal and universally relatable in each work and resonating in a way akin to poetry.

When we only think of states of being from a linear perspective, the paintings Heimer creates can be obscure, complex, and unimaginable. Through her images, the coexistence of several distinct states brings us to the point of division between parallel worlds. The work “Maternity” illustrates her after being born and before being adopted, this ephemeral state alters her life without leaving her with any options. In the transient state of chaos, the two trajectories of life silently fork apart. It could be as short as a few seconds, as she illustrated in “Darkness”, or it could be a whole life exploring and longing for belongingness. The prompting, nervousness, waiting, fear, and confusion that come in short or long bursts are genuine emotions conveyed through her unique, symbolic and repetitively appearing figures and iconography.

“Neither Here Nor There is a collection of narratives about existing in limbo. Each painting tells a personal account of a situation in which I’ve felt stuck, indecisive, frozen, or otherwise in some sort of waiting state. These in-between moments, after a transition has begun but before its resolution, can be a profoundly uncomfortable space to inhabit but one that is familiar and unique to the human condition.” – Andrea Heimer