Although photography is Caroline Heider´s main medium, she usually chooses the medium in accordance with the content of the work and not vice versa.Heider´s treatment of photography is conceptual, the subject matter is posed and the pictorial ideas are rendered with precision.
Photos are rarely individual and stand-alone. Generally they form part of pre-determined series that tell a story.
Heiders presents the six-part series "Grenzhaus"(Frontier House) edge to edge so that the photos-which show a brightly lit house and its dark surroundings from various perspectives, look like stills from a horror movie. Only the last of the pictures is set slightly apart from the others, disrupting the narrative course of the work.
Disturbance of this kind a intrinsic to Heiders works. In her most extensive work group so far, "Faltbilder" (foldings), the artist has the protagonist elements disappear from the photos by simply folding them away. The pictorial sources that she uses as base material are mostly shots from glossy magazines. In this way, models lose their faces,and a horse that was obviously trotting towards the sunset runs aimlessly away from the camera. Though the picture is deprived of its most important message, the relationship between the folded-away item and the background remains the same,with the background now being the only visible content. Viewers are thus required to replace the missing pictorial information in their minds.
For the five-part picture story "Aged in wood", Heider resorts to a number of borrowings from film and liturature alike. The principlal constituent is familiar figure from children´s fiction Pinocchio, the wooden rogue who in Carlo Collodi´s original version sets off on a long, lonely journey. Pinocchio´s story finally ends with him becoming human after he promised his father to be good from then on, and to be honest and hardworking.
However, Heider´s Pinocchio looks for his roots not his creator but in his materiality. He refuses to eke out an existance as well brought-up human child- where would the Adventures of Pinocchio then?-and decides to be assimilated into the wood once again. Heider again concentrates on what happens in between. Most of the pictures show only the forest, and we can at best merely sense the presence of the melancholic Pinocchio in the denseness of the trees. The titel "Aged in wood" relates to a fictional play from the classic "All about Eve".
Here, as also for Heider´s Pinocchio, the boundaries between the drama of life and stage drama are blurred.
(Katia Schurl 2006, Kunsthaus Graz für "Erzählungen,-35/65+, Zwei Generationen 04.11.2006 - 14.01.2007)
foto Kunsthaus Graz
