Josephine Heilpern, “We missed the whole thing.” in the Great Hall Gallery

“Space” and primarily “outer space” occupies almost every print, drawing and object in Josephine Heilpern’s show in the Great Hall Gallery. For the most part, though, Josephine’s glance is not upward or outward, but backward, back toward Earth with the aesthetic distance of 200,000 miles. This is most explicit in the triptych depicting a beautiful, shiny earth from different outer-space vantage points, but present in much of the work. In two drawings placed together, tourists reach out for a very distant and small—and as with everything in the show, gorgeous—earth.

It seems like Josephine is trying to say something about tourism, and a particularly American brand of tourism, as popular images of the moon landing, takes offs and landings, and earth from outer space are all crucial to modern American self-mythology. What have we missed? The trip to the moon? The trips that made the vantage points to see earth in this way possible?

“Space” in a more general sense gets a brief mention, in a small, seemingly out of place drawing of a staircase that pushes into the space of the picture. This was a good joke, I thought. And it was nice also to see a crack in the otherwise over-devotion to theme. Would it be okay to show something not at all related to space launches or to NASA memorabilia? It would have been nice, I think, to see more of these cracks, even if it compromised a scrupulousness to message.

Henry