Heidi Schwegler works in the interstitial ruins of Los Angeles, New York City and suburban America. She rescues haphazardly disused scraps from the bowels of the megalopolis: chicken bones, Big Gulps, broken signs, lost shoes, crumpled pylons, take out containers. Plastic, fiber, and bone: these materials decay but never decompose. A peerless craftsperson, she resynthesizes her sources into facsimiles with cast glass, gold, silver, wax, resulting in artwork that persists in a “living death.”

Heidi Schwegler (b. 1967 in San Antonio, TX) explores a wide range of materials in the service of her subject matter. She is drawn to the peripheral ruin, modifying discarded objects to give them a new sense of purpose. There is an equilibrium inherent in such things – they float between endurance and decay, a living death. According to Schwegler: "I reverse industrial production by abstracting and transforming durable, mass produced “stuff” into fragile, unique works of glass, porcelain, rubber, felt, and gold. Recognizable forms are cast in materials completely antithetical to intrinsic functions. When carefully reconstructed with valuable and worthless materials alike, then placed within the exhibition space, the forms both retain the aura of their original context and implicitly evoke the actions of the careless hands that discard them. By transfiguring these relics of consumption, I seek to create new relationships – at once seductive and alienating – between myself, my viewers, and that which has been discarded. My gambit allows a viewer to experience an object again for the first time. Objects with once-specific intentionality are reframed through the alchemical process of casting with and infused with new allegorical and poetic associations. Glass, in particular, is both limitless and idiosyncratic. Its casting process triangulates failure, the unexpected, the sublime. Within contemporary discourse, the “glitch” is invoked when speaking about accidents in technology, especially in the digital domain: figments, corruptions, and fugitive bits. For me, another kind of glitch occurs in the physical encounter with the discarded. Once collected, stuff becomes fodder for formal and theoretical investigations into mortality and consumption, beauty and waste, desire and humor." Schwegler’s numerous shows include exhibitions at the Co/Lab Art Fari (CA), Raid Projects, (CA), Platform China (Beijing), Scope Art 2004 (NY), and the Hallie Ford Museum (OR). Schwegler is a recent Ford Family Fellow, received a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship and several RACC Individual Project Grants. Reviews of Schwegler’s work have appeared in Art in America, Daily Serving, ArtNews and the Huffington Post. She earned her MFA from the University of Oregon and is Chair of the MFA in Applied Craft + Design, a joint program of Oregon College of Art and Craft, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.