BCC: Work by Frank Heath & Brendan Meara
Seeking a balance between the sacred and the profane, Meara’s works pair themes of melancholy and mortality through the poetic capabilities of ubiquitous objects and the capacity of humor to incite a theoretical view of existence. Utilizing motifs of scientific analysis such as high speed 16mm film, techniques of studio photography, and both perceived and metaphoric light forms, Meara’s works are an attempt to offer a reflective form of removal or distance that is simultaneously encapsulated by and released from the commonplace or everyday.
Frank Heath’s Fixed Window (Apparent Midnight) (2011) compiles a series of recorded telephone calls played alongside a minimal field of slate and glass. The audio shifts among numerous conversations between the artist and collaborator B.J. Wooley and calls surreptitiously placed to businesses and organizations. These exchanges constitute an illogical, almost absurd, form of investigation into an ostensibly fictional event, incorporating the fabrication of the physical structure of glass and slate into this fictive space, as well as a self-reflexive deliberation and strategizing on the conception of the work itself.