Patti Heid

From The Los Angles Times of Sept. 9, 1990

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-09/entertainment/ca-266_1_patti...

Patti Heid Tries to Make Sense of the Media and the World

September 09, 1990|SHAUNA SNOW

Patti Heid doesn't want to stay behind the "art world shield." Although she says that once was the case, she now wants to do more than just create art to please her own abstract imaginings. Her goal now, she says, is to "change the world."

"Everything changed once I had Joey," says Heid, speaking of her son, who developed a potentially fatal syndrome soon after his birth. Although he needed constant monitoring for years, he's now a healthy 5-year-old.

"I started caring about life and what happens to him," says Heid, 38. "Before, my work was much more abstract, more Dadaist. But as a mother, when I saw all the things going on out there, I was horrified, and I wanted to do something about it. I'm shocked at what has happened; we can't save our planet anymore."

In the past, Heid's works were much more commercial, such as her 1984 series of Olympics-inspired paintings, which were satirical but had a slick quality. She has now set out to "make my minor statement and my own contribution toward changing the world." That statement is through a new body of work, "Media Sedation," which took her two years to complete. The show, which went on view this week at Santa Monica's Brendan Walter Gallery, is her first since Joey's birth.

"Media Sedation" is comprised of 18 paintings of political and violent images derived from those seen nightly on TV newscasts. Examples include "Imelda Praying," which shows Imelda Marcos praying next to a pair of leopard-skinned shoes formed into a cross; "No Reasonable Offer," which depicts a smiling Ronald Reagan, and "Geraldo: His Own Story," in which a bandaged Geraldo Rivera is shown alongside headlines about his nose being broken in a television brawl.

"It's just so preposterous what's on the news," says Heid, who is married to actor Cheech Marin. "These are heroes and idols; role models for some people. It's scary that they're the ones controlling the media."

To create her pieces, Heid takes real video images and enlarges and mutates them with a computer. She airbrushes the images with acrylic on canvas to get a video-screen look, then adds heavy brush strokes, streaks and thick paint to "incorporate more Angst " into her colorful works.

"Maybe I can't really change the world, but I feel I'm making a little bit of difference," says Heid. "There's so many things going on out there that are so horrifying they just tear me apart. So I'm trying to do my part to change that."