Robert Chase Heishman:
Common Bond

Common Bond is an exhibition of new work by Robert Chase Heishman. The title names the structural logic in bricklaying of the "common bond", also known as the "American bond". The pattern places courses of bricks laid lengthwise along the face of a wall, which are periodically interrupted by a header course, bricks turned perpendicular to bind the wall from face to core. No course stands alone. Each depends on the one below it, and the header — the brick that turns — is what makes the whole thing hold. The bond is, before anything else, a matter of mutual support.

The exhibition presents three trajectories in Heishman's practice. A large-scale photographic work from the ongoing _IMG series will be arranged in the common bond pattern, tiled across a wall on panels, its construction forming an image. Timestamp is a series of chance-derived photographic excerpts from his point-and-shoot film camera, each marked by a date-stamp recorded at a specific moment of exposure. Time is burned into film, once performing as a footnote, now the main subject, set against the happenstance of its context – a particular photograph at a particular time, in an unspecified place. Memory Colors works take their name from a concept in color science: hues human beings carry in the body before language shapes the tongue — the green of foliage, the blue of open sky — colors so instinctually known that photographic calibration has standardized them as reference colors, benchmarks against which an image can be brought into correspondence with the world as we know and remember it. Each piece from the series carries a Braille-inscribed panel: a haptic alt text, factual and personal, intuitive and embellished, moving between documentary record and musing.

A façade is the face of a structure turned toward the world. It may be load-bearing or purely surface, structural or decorative, and from the outside you cannot always tell which. Images work the same way: they can hold things up, move people, open the world to itself, bind us to one another; they can also mask, distort, and substitute for the thing they describe. With domestic and global instability, climate catastrophe, and a renewed and invigorated labor movement, Common Bond urges the question: what and how do we want to build now?

Robert Chase Heishman (b. 1984; Des Moines, Iowa) is an artist and filmmaker working with images and reality. He makes photographs, videos, and films that approach image-making as both a physical act and an inquiry. His practice is shaped by his family lineage of bricklayers and farmers, collaborations with other artists (stemming from an early collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), and a perennial love for photography and film as mediums for existential rumination.

He has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Sharjah Biennial 14 (UAE), Brooklyn Academy of Music (NY), Andrea Rehder Arte Contemporânea (São Paulo), Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), Barbara Wien Gallery (Berlin), Festival d’Automne (Paris; Tunis), Goldmine (Pittsburgh), BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery (Poland), NON STNDRD/National Building Arts Center (St. Louis), Stavanger Kunstmuseum (Norway), and Triskel Arts Centre (Ireland), among others, as well as throughout Chicago at the Cultural Center, LVL3, Roots & Culture, University Club, Co-Prosperity, The Peninsula, DOCUMENT, Lewis Bag, Block Museum of Art, and Chicago Manual Style. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He has collaborated with Merce Cunningham, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Michael Rakowitz, and Megan Schvaneveldt. 

Heishman is a recipient of various awards including the Illinois Arts Council Visual Based Arts Fellowship, Newcity Breakout Artist, and LATITUDE Artist in Residence. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University's Art Theory & Practice program and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute's Photography & New Media and Art History programs.