Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Heydt.
Sam, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My name is Sam Heydt, I am a recycled media and social practice artist as well as the founder of Jane Street Studio, an independent creative design firm. My interest in art and design was sparked at an early age by my father who himself is a painter. His prolific oeuvre has impacted how I experiment with color and has inspired me to develop an ambitious practice, despite the divergence in our subject matter. In contrast to his traditional watercolor portraits, my work is politically entrenched with a surrealist satire.
It interrogates tensions surrounding exploitation, gender, and the environment, mainly through personal archives, found images, and “old” static media forms, often trespassing their associative use. A lifelong environmentalist, my preoccupation with conservation informed my practice with the material I use and themes I choose to thread throughout. As my work, by and large, speaks to a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line, one marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds.
Working on several pieces at a time under the aegis of a range of different media- film, photography, installation, graphics, sculpture, sound and text, I aim to preserve a disintegrating present with the urgency of recording the human experience. My work presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past but built on it. The layering of imagery definitive of my work aims to conflate time with place and disrupt logical relationships between occurrences. Through adding and subtracting meaning by combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, I confront the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The artworld is not one of gender parity. Making it as an artist is difficult as is, making it as a female artist whose art form isn’t shedding her attire is another animal. One has to be resilient in the face of resistance. Significantly under-representation in galleries and art fairs, females makeup only a small share of the art market and tend to sell for significantly less.
The illusion that this gender bias is bygone is just that- an illusion, with women accounting for only two percent of sales in the art market last year. This disparity is particularly flagrant when one considers the impact women have had on art history. As the Guerrilla Girls famously pointed out, “less than % of the artist in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”. So despite institutional attempts at affirmative action art, as it stands now, a woman’s place in the art world still seems predominantly confined to subject matter rather than producer of art forms.
Jane Street Studio – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I launched Jane Street Studio, L.L.C., a photo studio and independent creative design firm, in the Meatpacking District in 2012. Having graduated with a fine arts degree in photography, launching the commercial studio felt like a natural trajectory for me at the time. Since established, the company has expanded its services to Sydney [Australia], Vienna [Austria] and Miami [Florida] – providing design and marketing solutions in addition to photography and art direction. It’s growing roster of clients span Europe, North & South America, Asia and Oceania. Over the last several years however, I have shied away from commercial projects and shifted my focus to work of more personal meaning.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Being able to wake up everyday and do what you love.
Contact Info:
- Address: Sam HEYDT
401 Ocean Dr
Miami, FL 33140 - Website: http://www.samheydt.com/
- Phone: 401.662.1627
- Email: mgmt@heydtstudio.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/samheydt
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Heydt-Photography/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/samheydt
- Other: https://www.jane-street-studio.com/
Image Credit:
Sam Heydt
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