Artist: Mary Beth Heffernan

Discovery

Artist: Mary Beth Heffernan (United States, b. 1965)

MARY BETH HEFFERNAN is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores the interplay of corporeality and images. She is Professor of Sculpture, Photography and Interdisciplinary Art at Occidental College. Heffernan earned her BFA at Boston University in 1987, graduating Magna Cum Laude and awarded the Kahn Career Entry Award. She earned her MFA in the Photography Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1994, and appointed a Studio Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program 1994-95.

“I use a broad range of media and different modes of address; the work is united by abiding questions about physicality and representation: How are bodies transcribed into photographs, scans or algorithms? How do pictures literally and figuratively change our bodies and our relationship with others? How and when does language take on physical force? What are the gaps and failures of language to translate the complexities of the physical world, daily labor, bodily experience, and, more broadly, ourselves as subjects?”