Heidi Norton: Lucent Matter

Lucent Matter brings together works from across Heidi Norton’s career to examine preservation, transformation, and ecological time. Informed by her upbringing as the child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia, Norton’s practice is rooted in a sustained engagement with land, plant life, and the instability of memory. Organic matter, photographic fragments, and studio detritus are pressed, embedded, cast, and layered within glass, wax, resin, polymer, pigment, and paint. Across these works, materials continually shift roles: glass becomes photographic, resin recalls sap or amber, wax suggests sediment and geological strata, and paintings take on the appearance of translucent objects. Referencing scientific specimens, microscope slides, and systems of display, Norton considers the paradox of preservation—the ways an attempt to protect or contain something also alters it, transforming living matter into image, object, or artifact.

Within the atrium, Norton extends these ideas into the surrounding architecture, using its marble surfaces, windows, and transparent thresholds to create the impression of a glasshouse or viewing chamber. A horizontal platform establishes a horizon line, while a circular plane of glass suggests a suspended sun, making light both a material and an active element of the installation. Living, preserved, dead, and artificial plants occupy different stages of transformation, while works that initially appear fixed remain subject to decay, shifting surfaces, and changing illumination. Throughout the exhibition, images and objects move between forms: objects become photographs, photographs become material surfaces, and remnants of earlier works are incorporated into new ones. Rather than presenting nature as stable or timeless, Lucent Matter emphasizes its continual change and examines how nature is staged, preserved, and made visible—and how those processes alter what they seek to protect.

Heidi Norton is a New York–based artist and writer whose work explores ecology, preservation, material transformation, and plant life, informed by her upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia. She received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent and selected exhibitions include Château La Coste, France; Placed, Livingston, Montana; The Pit, Los Angeles; Uffner Liu, New York; Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Turley Gallery, Hudson; Halsey McKay, East Hampton; Wave Hill; Lubeznik Center for the Arts; The Contemporary, Baltimore; the Knitting Factory; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum; Sargent’s Daughters; GRIMM; the Chicago Cultural Center; and La Box, École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, France. Her writing and work have appeared in Artnet, ARTnews, Art21, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, and the Journal for Artistic Research, as well as in Grafts by Michael Marder and Why Look at Plants, edited by Giovanni Aloi. Norton’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Elgin Community College; the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; Unilever Corporation; the Joyce Foundation; and Jeanne Gang / Studio Gang Architects. She is the founder and director of Vantage Points and teaches at the International Center of Photography.

Heidi Norton: Lucent Matter is curated by Tessa Ferreyros and sponsored by Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings.

TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and guests.

Founded in 1966, Time Equities, Inc. (“TEI”) is a diversified investment, development, asset and property management, and alternative energy company that has been in business for more than 56 years. TEI currently holds in its own portfolio approximately 40.6 million square feet of residential, industrial, office and retail property including about 5,300 multi-family apartment units, approximately 245,000 square feet in pending acquisitions, and 1 million square feet of various property types in stages of pre-development and development. With 339 properties across 35 states, five Canadian provinces, Anguilla, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Scotland, the TEI portfolio benefits from a diversity of asset types including non-performing loans, B-notes, and alternative energy investments. TEI has a variety of market concentrations in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and West Coast of the U.S., and new markets around the world are always being evaluated.