“For years, Heer has used a wide variety of means - photographs, drawings, sculptural objects, installations, sound - to explore the nexus between memory and identity. By repeatedly directing attention to the way each instrument (camera lens, fabric, wax, fired clay, wood construction, etc.) partialities and distorts, by insisting upon the defamiliarising effect of close-ups, blurring, breakages, and uncommon angles of view, she has suggested that what we know of reality is, in truth, only so much as we know of the accounts of reality that we present, and re-present, to ourselves and to others. (Therefore her notion of “reality” is catholic enough to encompass wishes and fantasies, theories and dreams. What we perceive, her work implies, is a function of who we are: and who we are derives, in large part, from what we perceive.) To understand such reckonings, we must first understand the discourse - visual or verbal - in which they are expressed.”

Richard Vine, Editor and chief of Art in America

History

What to do with moment by moment by moment, all sensors open, outrageous flood of events, micro-events, worlds ablaze, a monumental river of fragments, the mounds of jewels and refuse among the elapsed, piled high on the territory we call memory - a jagged landscape, marred, cravassed, folder, gorged. What to do?

What to do with the moment - when a single, glistening bird’s wing, carving it’s track into the sky, momentarily eclipses all there ever was? Events of all times dwarfed by a gesture as minute, yet grand, monumental, as the universe and it’s star-lit topography itself. Piled onto time. The moment, never to be lifted but heaped, as moments are, recorded by millions of eyes, ears and skins, washed ashore by oceans of minds, deposited strata by strata…. fermenting into the sediment of time.

(…. or was it an angel?)

The poet does not insist on presenting all the events of his life and doesn’t refuse to present them either. He brings in enough to make the poem his, but is sparing, so that space opens behind the details, just as there is space between the stars in a constellation, so that through the space the reader may see the other world, may see the mountain night.

Daily in context, out of place, in a continent, or in a shade of light, neither a clue nor evidence thereof, can tell us we ourselves are there. Here is the imagery. That immediate fodder is imagery. The themes are eternally paradoxical, and synchronous as life is and can be. Or was? In search of the future present .... We find a part of ourselves. Look! It is where we are drawn into a space as time.

Excerpts from an essay by 
John Grande, Montreal 
On Topography of Desire 
September 2002

Zeitvergeudung

Wie denn soll Zeit vergeudbar sein, wenn Zeit doch beständig, unaufhaltsam abrollt, fliesst, sich dauernd selbst ablöst und sich in ihren eigenen Raum krümmt. Es ist müssig, sich über die Frage ihrer Nutzung oder Vergeudung zu ereifern, da Zeit weder erfasst noch freigesetzt werden kann. Sie kann uns, jedoch, wie eine Woge ergreifen und uns ins Dickicht aller Abläufe mitreissen oder uns leblos, belanglos aufs Trockene werfen. So oder so, Zeit fliesst um uns herum, irgendwann beugen wir uns in sie hinein und irgendwann, wird sie sich selbst entrinnen.

The exhibition was an ode to my dying mother (97), carving a her path of light through her brave life of love and generosity.

Book publication “tales unclaimed”, Charlotte, NC, 1999