NEW YORK, NY.- Christopher Henry Gallery presents Heidi Whitman’s new body of work: Heaven, Hell, and Here. On view from March 20, 2014 through April 20, 2014, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a paper universe of the mind’s making.

Heidi Whitman’s abstract and metaphysical wall maps exist in the concrete and tangible acts of drawing, painting, cutting, pasting, and layering hundreds of sheets of paper. Cartographic combinations of flat and 3-dimensional constructions depicting Heaven, Hell, and Here are as rooted in neuroscience, philosophy, religion, and literature as they are in architectural ground planning, topography, and geography. Components painted in acrylic and gouache on rice paper range from matrices of ancient Roman cities to contemporary aerial and stellar maps and microscopic images of the brain. These works on paper are meticulously deconstructed and rearranged in a variety of layers and joined with other painted papers cut into expressive shapes. Convoluted curls and twists cast evocative shadows. The three separate wall pieces were designed with the premise that the imagined (heaven and hell) and the real (here) can combine into a complex, all-encompassing whole.

A site-responsive installation housed in a church turned gallery, the three works Heaven, Hell, and Here are exquisitely crafted tableaus of multi-layered streams of consciousness. Dynamic, obsessive, and contemplative, they form an intuitive dialogue that diagrams the fragile connections between the physical and spiritual world. Their subtly evolving and graceful patterns cut and filter the light and shadows into rhythmic sequences that deliver an ethereal, if not sublime experience.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ---John Milton, Paradise Lost