DAMN° 86 – Trees Heil: Sighting the Imaginary
Trees Heil uses photographs to imagine life. In one deadpan series, eclectically-styled pole dancers are photographed in unusual public settings; twirling on lamp posts, splayed up street signs, and contorted around handrails. The series is provocative and in direct tension with regular, everyday life. “Some people were politely curious and even supportive”, Heil says, “but others walked over with their camera phones ready, they leered and encroached.” Heil’s production assistant had to act as security to protect the magic circle of the playful dance-world from the mundane jeers of the neighbouring real world.
She describes her works as “vision quests”, which is a curious term used in contexts of both supernatural mysticism and sober self-improvement. She puts it bluntly: “My photographs are ways of imagining things that I would like to become real.” But there is nothing practical in these imaginings, there are no sensible designs for these desired futures to be made truly real because Heil does not, for instance, literally want to see pole dancers in parks. Instead, the photographs, as visions, are more poetically elliptical. Possibly, what Heil wants is to see is something at odds with what is readily apparent. For instance, the erotic in the mundane (Poledance), love in times of dispassion (The Kissing Scene), the private in public (Sunflower Shower). As such, Heil stages scenes of contrarian make-believe as a way to manifest alternatives to the insipidly predictable.
In this way, her work has similar aims to René Boer’s recent book, Smooth City. For Boer, cities become smooth when disorder is designed out of them and when their complexity is flattened into commodifiable simplicity. When we live in this worryingly common condition, Boer argues, it is nearly impossible to take the critical distance necessary to imagine other ways of being. Boer frequently revisits De Wallen, in Amsterdam—commonly known as the “Red-light District”—as an example of a historically divergent place now being smoothed out into regular, profitable conformity. It’s a 10 minute cycle away from Westerpark, where Heil stages many of her photographs. Arguably, she uses her self-described “pornographic visual language” as a way to resist the kinds of smoothening Boer describes. The result is that her photographs appear to come from an unusual urban hinterland, somewhere that feels undesignated, undeveloped, and quasi-wild.
Heil affords this porosity of place, as Boer might call it, through the anti-disciplinary ways that she works. She uses rough sketches, “drawn out in a few minutes,” to choreograph her scenes. “I don’t overthink them”, she explains, “and I don’t edit them either, I just scribble them out in a frenzy.” On the day of the shoot, there are impromptu costume changes based on items brought on a whim by her models. Even her sketchbooks, a resource with no obvious role in her final work, hyperactively slice and stick together unassociated sets of laserjet printed google images. On one page, for example, there is Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, holding a severed head. The ragged sticky tape holding down Shiva’s lower edge is shared by a wonky printout of two drag queens in a bathroom, a well-known Nan Goldin snap. Both of these images overlap an artfully black and white photograph of a bare arse, “I found it in a magazine, I don’t know which one.” All of these promiscuous improvisations can not be considered well-honed strategies to organise creativity, if anything, they seem to be working as a means to disrupt any kind of organisation. As such, in her working process, what Heil is making tangible is a sensuous precarity.
Despite their clear artifice, it is this ad hoc style of working that makes Heil’s photographs feel uncontrived and seem almost natural. As such, they are not staged to appear picture-like, all of this pretence in performance is not a means to manufacture a photograph. Instead, they are treated more like living scenarios recorded as images. In other words, they are documents of an unseen but nonetheless real reality.
This is most evident in Heil’s various Horse series. Mostly staged around Westerpark, Heil photographs young models crudely disguised as horses. They use twigs for tails and jute bags as hooves. It looks as if they are acting out traditional stories from a mythical, indigenous culture. Playing into this fantasy of the faraway is the unusual rub of shaving foam and slurry of off-white plaster that dries and cracks, on their feet, legs, arms and chests—it’s reminiscent of Aboriginal body painting. The documented ceremonial-looking scenes, in part, cast Heil as a watchful explorer. In this mytho-ethnographic role, the “natives” Heil photographs are poised more than posed; they do not turn away from the camera in modesty of their nudity, rather, they are turning towards it, they are cooperating, albeit timorously, with the respectfully curious “outsider” photographer.
Heil’s work peels off from the same genealogy as Dian Arbus’ photographs of American misfits. But when Arbus pointed her lens at the “freakish” that were already there but out of sight, Heil makes what has never been real appear to be hidden. As such, through Arbus’ lens, there is a cultural breadth beyond the frame of the misfit, whereas Heil’s aperture terminates at the imaginary. This means that there is no way to cogently explain the scenes in Heil’s photographs because there is no logical surplus beyond their unreality. This is precisely what makes her audiences fantasise and speculate and this is why these photographs are so necessary now in the pervasive context of “the smooth”.
“There are many ways to think about my work, but there are just as many ways to feel the work too. It’s the ambiguities of the instinctual and the somatic that excites me. At times, we over-invest in the rational mind but that way of thinking can be clumsy when it tries to grapple complex things. Intuition is my guide, that’s why I photograph what I do, and that’s why I work in the ways I work.”
Heil’s latest three-part exhibition, Tableau Vivant, has large scale projections of still and moving images seemingly tributed by live performers backed by ambient soundscapes. The whole thing is dream-like, maybe hypnagogic. It was first exhibited in 2023 at Kunstliefde, Utrecht as part of the Le Guess Who festival. The last of the performances will be in March 2024 at Perdu Theater, Amsterdam. The alibi for this spectacle is not art, rather, it is the urgency to encounter another way of being that surpasses our unseen (newly smooth) customs. “I’m trying to evade the deathgrip of the absolute. There are so many ways of being together with each other, and this is just one of them.”
She describes her works as “vision quests”, which is a curious term used in contexts of both supernatural mysticism and sober self-improvement. She puts it bluntly: “My photographs are ways of imagining things that I would like to become real.” But there is nothing practical in these imaginings, there are no sensible designs for these desired futures to be made truly real because Heil does not, for instance, literally want to see pole dancers in parks. Instead, the photographs, as visions, are more poetically elliptical. Possibly, what Heil wants is to see is something at odds with what is readily apparent. For instance, the erotic in the mundane (Poledance), love in times of dispassion (The Kissing Scene), the private in public (Sunflower Shower). As such, Heil stages scenes of contrarian make-believe as a way to manifest alternatives to the insipidly predictable.
In this way, her work has similar aims to René Boer’s recent book, Smooth City. For Boer, cities become smooth when disorder is designed out of them and when their complexity is flattened into commodifiable simplicity. When we live in this worryingly common condition, Boer argues, it is nearly impossible to take the critical distance necessary to imagine other ways of being. Boer frequently revisits De Wallen, in Amsterdam—commonly known as the “Red-light District”—as an example of a historically divergent place now being smoothed out into regular, profitable conformity. It’s a 10 minute cycle away from Westerpark, where Heil stages many of her photographs. Arguably, she uses her self-described “pornographic visual language” as a way to resist the kinds of smoothening Boer describes. The result is that her photographs appear to come from an unusual urban hinterland, somewhere that feels undesignated, undeveloped, and quasi-wild.
Heil affords this porosity of place, as Boer might call it, through the anti-disciplinary ways that she works. She uses rough sketches, “drawn out in a few minutes,” to choreograph her scenes. “I don’t overthink them”, she explains, “and I don’t edit them either, I just scribble them out in a frenzy.” On the day of the shoot, there are impromptu costume changes based on items brought on a whim by her models. Even her sketchbooks, a resource with no obvious role in her final work, hyperactively slice and stick together unassociated sets of laserjet printed google images. On one page, for example, there is Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, holding a severed head. The ragged sticky tape holding down Shiva’s lower edge is shared by a wonky printout of two drag queens in a bathroom, a well-known Nan Goldin snap. Both of these images overlap an artfully black and white photograph of a bare arse, “I found it in a magazine, I don’t know which one.” All of these promiscuous improvisations can not be considered well-honed strategies to organise creativity, if anything, they seem to be working as a means to disrupt any kind of organisation. As such, in her working process, what Heil is making tangible is a sensuous precarity.
Despite their clear artifice, it is this ad hoc style of working that makes Heil’s photographs feel uncontrived and seem almost natural. As such, they are not staged to appear picture-like, all of this pretence in performance is not a means to manufacture a photograph. Instead, they are treated more like living scenarios recorded as images. In other words, they are documents of an unseen but nonetheless real reality.
This is most evident in Heil’s various Horse series. Mostly staged around Westerpark, Heil photographs young models crudely disguised as horses. They use twigs for tails and jute bags as hooves. It looks as if they are acting out traditional stories from a mythical, indigenous culture. Playing into this fantasy of the faraway is the unusual rub of shaving foam and slurry of off-white plaster that dries and cracks, on their feet, legs, arms and chests—it’s reminiscent of Aboriginal body painting. The documented ceremonial-looking scenes, in part, cast Heil as a watchful explorer. In this mytho-ethnographic role, the “natives” Heil photographs are poised more than posed; they do not turn away from the camera in modesty of their nudity, rather, they are turning towards it, they are cooperating, albeit timorously, with the respectfully curious “outsider” photographer.
Heil’s work peels off from the same genealogy as Dian Arbus’ photographs of American misfits. But when Arbus pointed her lens at the “freakish” that were already there but out of sight, Heil makes what has never been real appear to be hidden. As such, through Arbus’ lens, there is a cultural breadth beyond the frame of the misfit, whereas Heil’s aperture terminates at the imaginary. This means that there is no way to cogently explain the scenes in Heil’s photographs because there is no logical surplus beyond their unreality. This is precisely what makes her audiences fantasise and speculate and this is why these photographs are so necessary now in the pervasive context of “the smooth”.
“There are many ways to think about my work, but there are just as many ways to feel the work too. It’s the ambiguities of the instinctual and the somatic that excites me. At times, we over-invest in the rational mind but that way of thinking can be clumsy when it tries to grapple complex things. Intuition is my guide, that’s why I photograph what I do, and that’s why I work in the ways I work.”
Heil’s latest three-part exhibition, Tableau Vivant, has large scale projections of still and moving images seemingly tributed by live performers backed by ambient soundscapes. The whole thing is dream-like, maybe hypnagogic. It was first exhibited in 2023 at Kunstliefde, Utrecht as part of the Le Guess Who festival. The last of the performances will be in March 2024 at Perdu Theater, Amsterdam. The alibi for this spectacle is not art, rather, it is the urgency to encounter another way of being that surpasses our unseen (newly smooth) customs. “I’m trying to evade the deathgrip of the absolute. There are so many ways of being together with each other, and this is just one of them.”
Photography by Trees Heil.
