Jay Heikes
“Devolve”
New York, 509 West 24th Street
Throughout his materially innovative and richly conceptual practice, Heikes continuously reimagines an atlas of signs and symbols and stories, largely of his own creation. Drawing on art’s divergent histories—from the material and alchemical preoccupations of Arte Povera to the revolutionary critique of Russian Constructivism to the Romantic fascination with the sublime—Heikes examines themes of evolution and regeneration, stasis and corrosion, entropy and transformation. Acknowledging that there are no truly new ideas to be had, Heikes turns to what has already been; his practice is in a continual state of borrowing, transposing, appropriating, and reinterpreting old ideas and forms and narratives using a kaleidoscopic array of media, remaining perpetually open to transformation within his work and within himself.
Installation view, Devolve, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, September 5 — October 5, 2024
With Devolve, Heikes transports viewers to an imagined future—one devoid of human civilization—as plants and animals continue to transform the languishing artifacts of a distant past society. Weaving together inspiration from an array of divergent source material—from the creation story told in the Book of Genesis, from Joseph Grigely’s 1995 Textualterity, from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, from a dissent in a 2022 New York Court of Appeals decision regarding the fate of Happy the elephant—Heikes reflects on the signs and omens that foretold man’s imminent demise. Through paintings, installations, and a monumental new sculpture, Heikes examines theories of evolution and creationism, notions of agency and authorship, and the inevitable end of our collective march toward progress.
Each work in the exhibition builds on a constellation of allusions—to the history of art, to literary theory, to anthropological and legal discourse, to the artist’s own oeuvre—all embodying the notion of transformation itself. For the titular Devolve (2024), Heikes cannibalizes elements of previous bodies of work to reconstruct a series of hooks, descending in height—an evolution chart in reverse. The hook—a recurring motif in the artist’s practice—brings to mind a litany of referents: a shepherd’s crook, a cane yanking unwelcome performers off stage, a Grim Reaper’s scythe. For Heikes, the Devolve hooks—the tallest of which is coated with sand and shellac, the secretions of the lac beetle—represents the cyclical nature of that which is old becoming new once again, the form itself drawing the artist in and out of seduction. Insects claim the surface of Heikes’s painting, too: In Textualterity (2023), hundreds of subtly rendered black ants trawl across the surface of a splatter-painted canvas. The subject—and title—reference Textualterity, Grigely’s book, an early edition of which featured a detailed image of a cicada embedded within the enamel house paint of Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950).
