It’s been such a trip working with @jayheikes on our show, Salvador Dali’s Birthday Party, through all its iterations and deviations, and a correspondence of images that became a beautiful book, to the opening next Friday the 6th in Minneapolis @davidpetersengallery
I can’t wait 🎈
Jay Heikes: Second Wave
January 24—February 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, January 24 from 5—7pm
Adams and Ollman is pleased to present Second Wave, a solo exhibition by Jay Heikes (b. 1975, Princeton, NJ; lives in St. Paul, MN and works in Minneapolis, MN). The exhibition, an immersive installation featuring new sculptural objects and sound.
Heikes is well-known for his world-building and expansive exhibitions that span multiple media—painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation. His work alludes to various histories and events, from personal narratives to cultural milestones to geological events. Heikes continues his interventions into the way we experience and understand the arc of human existence. Rather than following a rational or linear timeline, his work creates circular narratives that fold back upon themselves, suggesting an intricate alchemy of time.
In Second Wave, Heikes explores the paradoxical relationship between human progress and extinction. The artist examines a central dissonance: how advancement and decline occur simultaneously, with innovations that propel us forward also bringing us closer to collapse.
This conflict materializes in the exhibition through a discordant soundscape engineered by the artist from various homemade musical instruments—strings, ceramic whistles, and a finger piano. Heikes translates mood into both sound and form through an array of ingeniously repurposed materials. While his objects echo traditional musical instruments, they maintain a deliberately improvised, provisional quality. These experimental sound-making devices are complemented by functional paintings that serve as acoustic panels, alongside a sculptural installation featuring modified music stands displaying prints of seismographic readings rendered as musical notation.
If you are in NYC - LAST DAY to see my show at Marianne Boesky Gallery - 509 West 24th St. Thanks to the Boesky team and Deb Singer for making the run of the show so satisfying. Go see it if you can!
Wednesday, September 25 at 6:30 PM | Jay Heikes in conversation with Debra Singer
On Wednesday evening, independent curator and writer Debra Singer will join artist Jay Heikes for a conversation about Devolve.
Throughout his materially innovative and richly conceptual practice, Heikes continuously reimagines an atlas of signs and symbols and stories, largely of his own creation. Drawing on art’s divergent histories—from the material and alchemical preoccupations of Arte Povera to the revolutionary critique of Russian Constructivism to the Romantic fascination with the sublime—Heikes examines themes of evolution and regeneration, stasis and corrosion, entropy and transformation. Acknowledging that there are no truly new ideas to be had, Heikes turns to what has already been; his practice is in a continual state of borrowing, transposing, appropriating, and reinterpreting old ideas and forms and narratives using a kaleidoscopic array of media, remaining perpetually open to transformation within his work and within himself.
The event is free and open to the public.
Jay Heikes, Owl, 2016. Salt, sawdust, dirt and glue on wood, 23 x 18 x 13 inches, 58.4 x 45.7 x 33 cm
📸 Frankie Tyska
@jayheikes #JayHeikes #Devolve #MarianneBoeskyGallery
