Heather Hoover
Associate Professor, Printmaking
Department of Art
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
9201 University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223 USA
Telephone: 704-687-4477
Email: hhoover@email.uncc.edu
Exhibition: “Patterns of Kontakt Movement”
This project will involve the documentation of human pathways at conference sites in Berlin and Poznan during IMPACT 4. Through documentation I will draw chalk circles around, or take digital pictures, or place temporary silkscreen runs, or stickers, or some manner of documenting appropriate to the site. I will also collect various relics of pedestrian traffic, including cigarette butts, gum droppings, or some other site-specific evidence. After the conference has moved to Poznan I will present visual documentation of my work on the project in both print drawing forms, having created images on paper that record the sites and relics of pedestrian movement. The exhibition will be presented in the Rotunda Gallery in the entrance to the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan.
I am fascinated with apparently chaotic and random patterns that occur in nature. The stimulus for this work begins as a visual response on my part to the beauty of, well, patterns of litter (i.e., I think that “gum droppings” create exquisite patterns on sidewalks.) However, this work is fueled further by the conceptual purpose of documenting and investigating a “random” human pattern that reveals pedestrian navigational paths and points of contact. In this setting, the “paths” will reveal the paths taken by conference attendees (and other humans caught up in the same semi-organized but still random paths of contact) moving between event sites in two different cities. Since the documentation will be of outdoor relics, there will be patterns of dispersion away from event sites and patterns of confluence and contact at the edges of event site buildings.
Overall, a document of relic loci in one city exhibited beside (and perhaps also superimposed upon, depending upon the aesthetics of the patterns) a document of relic loci in the other city will visually expose these human patterns of movement and points of contact in the two cities/nations. By drawing connect-the-dots lines between the relic loci in each example, I will reveal patterns apparent to the viewer who may then visually compare and contrast the documented patterns of movement of Kontakt attendees making contact with one another in the two cities.
HEATHER HOOVER teaches at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her MFA degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro; a Tamarind Master Printer Certificate from the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico (1988); and a BA from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (1987). From 1985-1986 Hoover studied at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts and La Sorbonne, Université de Paris IV, Paris, France. Hoovers work has appeared in the "1st Internacional de Miniprint en Rosario", Rosario, Argentinia; "14th Miniprint International Exhibition",Yager Museum, Oneonta, New York; "8th International Biennial Print and Drawing Exhibit", R.O.C. -Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan; and the "Mini Print Internacional de Cadaqués, Taller Galleria Fort, Cadaqués, Spain. Hoover is represented in the collections of the American Horticultural Society, Richmond, Virginia; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; City University of New York, Bayside, New York; Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; and the University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi.