The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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Untitled (Film Noir #1437)
Bill Armstrong is interested in visual perception and his work explores how the eye reconciles visual information. Untitled (Film Noir #1437) belongs to his extensive Infinity series, in which the artist uses an extreme out-of-focus range to create figurative, yet abstract images steeped in color. He begins with a collage created from appropriated images that he has transformed in a variety of ways by photocopying, painting, and cutting. He adds colored foregrounds and backgrounds and, setting his camera’s focus to infinity, photographs the collage as a close-up. The edges of the individual elements become blurred, dematerializing the figures and creating “rhapsodies of color,” in the words of the artist, which evoke hazy memories or vague dreams. While the Infinity series comprises several discrete portfolios, the Film Noir photographs refer to classic black-and-white films from the 1940s and 50s. These works address themes of loneliness and alienation by depicting an indistinct solitary figure against an equally amorphous background, evoking the moral dilemmas of film noir characters, as well as of modern man.