Jay Heikes

Opening Reception Thursday, September 6, 6-8pm

For his first museum show, Jay Heikes will produce a unique installation in the Project Space which may include the following elements: a cement and brass "bed of nails," a digital cuckoo clock, a freezer wall, drawings and a stylized rat trap. These elements are among the "props" used to activate stories, puns, and a kind of deadpan humor that have appeared in past iterations of an ongoing work inspired by a rather arcane joke.

For the past couple of years, Heikes has been telling a joke—the same joke, over and over. The joke is about an impatient pirate and a smart-alecky parrot: "So there's this pirate..." it begins. Early in the process, Heikes performed the joke, videotaped it, and from there, employed an approach to transform the joke into a formal element in his drawings, sculpture and installation work. Over time, the joke has become a generative device, distilled in its visual components, which in turn have become Heikes' aesthetic language. The artist says:

"By telling the same joke over and over, I've realized its rigid structure allows me to find totally new directions every time I make this delivery—like splats and circles that relate to the art movements such as Pop Art and Expressionism. Eventually I imagine the narrative of the joke to be totally irrelevant and the stills to exist as a kind of green screen—a forum where any abstraction of the narrative exists as a collage within it."

At ICA, he will present what is the eighth re-telling of the joke, now bordering on complete independence from the original narrative.

Jay Heikes (b. 1967, Princeton, NJ, lives Minneapolis and New York) received his MFA from Yale University in 2005. His work was the subject of a solo show at Artists Space in 2003. Last year his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and was represented in a three-person show at the Walker Art Center. His work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center and the Altoids Collection at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It was also part of the publication roundup Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture, (Phaidon 2007).

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter, and will be accompanied by a brochure publication.

Project Space:
Jay Heikes