Sam Heydt : APOCALYPSE YESTERDAY

About

Sam Heydt is an American social practice and new media artist born 1986 and raised in New York City. Heydt has lived and worked in Vienna, Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Udaipur. After completing her studies at Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, Universidad de Buenos Aires, La Sorbonne and the Universiteit van Amsterdam, she has attended artist residencies in Iceland, Australia and New Zealand; and has undertaken a range of altruistic, non-profit work - the most recent being in Rajasthan, India As a fine art photographer, Heydt has exhibited in a constellation of galleries and museums throughout the world and is in the permanent collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

For Heydt, illusion won’t free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate invisible violence. The transformation of the global landscape under the weight of industrialization is central to her work, as is the residual of consumption, the mutability of history and the material inequalities of a world reduced to a bottom line. How will history judge us? Globalization has moved forward unevenly and no-one can say where this “New Frontier” is leading us. We pride ourselves on industrialization manufactured from the bones of a dying world. As the planet is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, the publics attention is held captive by the flickering tv screen, finding solace in the emp- ty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. Yet, illusion won’t save us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress reduces the world to a bottom line.