Fall 2009 Artist-in-Residence- Heather Layton

Heather Layton is a painter, performance artist, and Senior Lecturer of Art at the University of Rochester. She received an MFA in Painting from SUNY New Paltz in 2002 and a BFA in Art Education from Syracuse University in 1997. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty-three exhibitions in the past five years in cities including Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. This year, she received the Lillian Fairchild Award for her work, I Know It Happened and It Happened Like This, at the George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film. See more information at her website www.heatherlayton.com

About "Letters to a New Generation" by Heather Layton

At this current point in U.S. history, Donald Trump is far more famous to the average American than Greg Mortenson, a man who has spent the last 16 years establishing over 90 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan so that young women have access to education. This seems to indicate that pop culture is prioritizing monetary rewards over humanitarian efforts. In this social climate, I wonder if our ability to appreciate beauty has deteriorated in the wake of our desire for traditional wealth.

This installation reflects my interest in how the products we market reveal our expectations for a society and how the products we consume affect our experience of living within it. In an extreme case scenario, what would our lives look like if we measured the worth of every act and object exclusively on margins of profit? In another a hypothetical scenario, what would our society look like if we designated the value of our products based exclusively on the degree to which they increased the quality of our lives?

This time-based, collaborative installation is the inverse of a quick fix, an alternative to reality t.v., and the worst example of mass production possible. The work starts with rows of empty, interchangeable pouches made from ordinary fabric; stand-ins for the corporate-owned songs that play over and over again on the radio, the clothing that sits on the clearance racks at Walmart, and the 2.5 million cups of coffee served through a Dunkin Donuts take-out window in the United States every day. Throughout the course of a week, visitors are invited to write letters to a future generation. Each letter is then inserted into a pouch that, when turned inside out, transforms into an individually adorned, colorful vessel. Slowly, the space turns from all beige to fully colorful as the room fills with private offerings of wisdom, humor, advice, and reflection. The pouches, each sewn shut, become time capsules—significantly selfless gifts for a generation of people we will never meet. For a brief window of time, I hope to create a space that allows us to collectively imagine and appreciate something bigger and more important than ourselves.