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Alexander Heilner is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in photography, video, digital imaging, installation, lighting design, and sculpture. His work has been exhibited, screened, and performed nationally and internationally, and venues have ranged from the walls of MoMA to the catacombs of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.
In addition to his fine art work, Alex works selectively in photojournalism and commercial photography. His work has been featured in National Geographic, JPEG, Details, and on websites including public radio's Marketplace. He has traveled extensively, and especially seeks projects that take him to places he's never before experienced.
Alex earned his B.A. at Princeton University and his M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is a professor of photography and digital imaging at MICA - The Maryland Institute College of Art.
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Artist's Statement
Most of my artwork over the past twenty
years has been the result of my ongoing obsession with the integration
of the organic and the artificial in all areas of our human experience.
I am incorrigiably drawn to fringe landscapes where human development
is colliding withnatural phenomena. Sometimes this is on a grand (or
even grandiose) scale, as people build huge artificial islands or consume
entire segments of the earth's resources. At other moments I find myself
closing in on the particular and the delicate, as I watch a solitary
leaf slowly emerges from under fresh paint on a city street. Most recently,
my aerial photography has taken up a long-simmering interest in the unintentional
mark-making we lay across the land, in the form of our everexpanding
infrastructure.
Interwoven with this conceptual thread is my strong faith in the transcendent power of beauty. I am not shy about finding and relaying the formal allure that so often seems to surprise us when the wildness of nature aligns with the structured, orthoginal world of the human-built. I have been known to make special trips across the country, or even around the world to photograph something very specific or dramatic in this vein. But more often, I find my subjects closer to home, in the rusting marshes of New Jersey's Meadowlands, or in the scruffy hills behind Los Angeles housing developments. In fact, it is these everyday places that really dig in over time, and come to tell us the most about how we live with our surroundings.