A Particular Kind of Heaven

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together”

“I've got some real estate here in my bag”

So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies

And walked off to look for America

-       Simon and Garfunkel, “America,” 1968

Parrasch Heijnen is pleased to present A Particular Kind of Heaven, a group show curated by artist Ali Dipp.

The title of this show references Ed Ruscha's 1983 painting of the same name to suggest a central animating impulse in the nation's history: the landscape, when looked at from afar, stirs—and at times instantiates—American aspiration. Affixed at a vantage point where it can be perceived, horizons often dictate the country's expanse, a people's dream, and possibility's extent. This group show at parrasch heijnen heralds a reevaluation of the landscape's cultural import by entangling the concept with a rich array of inter-generational voices. Furthermore, by conveying how artists have and continue to view the landscape, this show reckons with the environment as a subject capable of providing unforeseeable visions.

Featured in this show, Mike Kelley’s American Landscape I, 1980, explores the genre’s quotidian sensibilities. Kelley’s acrylic painting of the moon splashing light across a cavernous valley, although inherently humble in composure, upwells profound historic stakes. Victoria Sambunaris’ 2020 photograph of trains paralleling flat earth, traces a critical throughline from the nineteenth-century’s railroad boom through NAFTA’s influence on infrastructure. Akin to Ken Price’s 1989 line drawing of a highway tracing the tops of rolling hills, both works suggest how the dictates of commerce permanently impress a changing earth. Christine Howard Sandoval’s International Standardization Organization, 2014-16, embosses a scenic image with the structure that seeks to measure vastness. Likewise, Gina Gwen Palacios’ 2023 painting on cardboard, which embosses a chain link fence’s lattice work upon a horizon, invokes a response to critic Dave Hickey’s notion that “beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.” Beauty, within the contexts of forecasting visions, is ever elusive—a mirage on the cement, perhaps ethereal as the crystalline bottle in William Eggleston’s photograph, Untitled (Bottle on Cement Porch), 1965-74.

A Particular Kind of Heaven champions the myriad perspectives required to reckon with the future’s pervasive possibilities. Ultimately, in offering the subject a second look, the exhibition ushers the prospects of new, even bold, advents.

A Particular Kind of Heaven includes work by: Peter Alexander, Carlos Almaraz, Anne Appleby, Jennifer Bartlett, Forrest Bess, Katherine Bradford, Ali Dipp, William Eggleston, EJ Hauser, Olivia Hill, Christine Howard Sandoval, Mike Kelley, Maya Lin, John McAllister, Laurie Nye, Gina Gwen Palacios, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Ken Price, Eleanor Ray, Ed Ruscha, Victoria Sambunaris, Stephen Shore, Ellen Siebers, Maya Stovall, riel Sturchio, and H.C. Westermann. 

–      ­Ali Dipp

A closing reception will be hosted at 2p on Saturday, June 3, which includes a conversation between art historian Alexander Nemerov, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University, and curator Ali Dipp. Nemerov is the recipient of numerous academic awards. His book, Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (2021), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. His most recent book The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s was published in March of this year.