Interview by Hallie Hart
The first word that comes to mind when I think of Sam Heydt is albatross; a bird built to soar. I was asked by Steven Lyon to write an article, a q and a that had personality about another female artist, at first I really didn’t think I was the person to do it, I knew nothing about this girl other than her name attached to some films I liked. I didn’t really know Sam Heydt like I should to be writing about her.
So, of course the challenge presented itself and hey I’m not one to walk away from anything, so I went on a bit of mission to dive into articles, other interviews, anything I could find about Sam. What I discovered was much more than one could just research, much more than just a brilliant mind making history for all of us girls.
In the course of my search, probing Sam and really considering who this woman was, I found out a lot about myself. I established that Sam was a layered, complex artist, a woman that wanted to fill up the world with knowledge and feed herself the world to gain even more, and why….. all for the greater good.
I discovered an individual that has no boundaries, she thinks… she does…., talk is nonsense for her sometimes, she must see it and then conquer it. I have such a full chest from learning about her, my belief is that you will too. In all of this I too found a bit of Sam in me and it made very proud… a glimmer of her and a better understanding of why I do what I do.
Thank you Sam
“The exploitation of a world reduced to a bottom line coupled with the social disillusionment underpinning is a theme threaded through the anthology of my work.”
Q: Would you consider yourself a renaissance women?
A: Always felt that term is a bit pretentious, but as an artist I do work across a myriad of different media; film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, always learning new technical approaches to employ.
Q: Julian Schnabel got criticized for doing film and painting, what do you have to say about this?
A: Ridiculous.
Q: Do you feel like critics and in general people try to put you in a labeled box?
A: I don’t pay much attention or care what people think.
Q: Has there been someone in your family that has had a profound influence on you and your work?
A: My interest in art was sparked at an early age by my father, who himself is a painter. His prolific oeuvre not only impacted how I experiment with color, but inspired me to develop an ambitious practice. Although our subject matter and approach could not be more different. In contrast to his traditional watercolor portraits, my work is politically entrenched with a surrealist satire interrogating the tensions surroundings exploitation, gender and the environment.
Q: Describe yourself, as if no one could read about you on the internet…art, your life, funny habits, what people would say about you?
A: Creative recluse environmentalist
Q: I felt I could see the connection throughout all of your work, I find your style quite noticeable. There is a question here… how did you come to this style of story telling? I see bold, yet subtle enough messages spilling out everywhere.
A: The story of my life is the story of the world. In its exhaustible invention of deduction and speculation, the medium of capturing images is nothing more than a chemically processed imprint causally connected to reality- while photo montages are bound to neither truth nor objectivity, yet the subjective and universal both emerge.
“For me, the world insists on being revealed — my documentation of it manifest as an abstraction of the bigger picture.
“The vices of the first world are the burden of the third.”
