Northeastern professor Julia Hechtman’s work will be on display in the Brookline Arts Center from July 5 through Sept. 30.
Outside of her work as a teaching art and design at Northeastern University, Julia Hechtman has amassed her own body of creative work. Her visual art offers glimpses of the natural world, inspired in part by Hechtman’s time traveling the globe, from Iceland to the Arctic Circle.
Now, the teaching professor and associate chair of the Department of Art and Design is bringing a bit of the Arctic to Brookline, Massachusetts with her upcoming exhibit at the Brookline Arts Center. “An Unkindness” will be on view from July 5 to Sept. 30 and features video, photos and a whole lot of birds — about 200 to be precise — sculpted by Hechtman.
“An unkindness is a group of ravens,” Hechtman said. “The idea was thinking about groups of birds. I’m in a bit of a bird zone at the moment, but there are themes that run through all the works, like the human perspective on nature and the fragility of the natural world and humanity.”
“How I’m conceiving this exhibition, it’s like an outsider looking in, which is my relationship to the natural world,” she continued. “So much of the imagery in there is going to be from (that) vantage point.”
The exhibit came about when the executive director of Brookline Art Center, Gabrielle Domb, visited Hechtman’s studio.
In particular, she loved Hechtman’s video work from her time as a Fulbright scholar in Iceland. Hechtman recorded residents telling a personal story about a place they love — then went to these places and shot footage. The exhibit will include these stories and the footage that captures the essence of the place, down to the horses or birds that came up and nudged the cameras. There will be a different set of videos during each month of the exhibit.
Hechtman has been creating videos since the 2000s, but the bird sculptures represent a new medium she has been experimenting with the past few years. It was coming across a dead gannet in particular — a large seabird with blue eyes and a yellow crest — that prompted Hechtman to expand into sculpting. She tried to photograph the bird on a light table, but found she couldn’t capture its essence.
“It was so clinical,” she said. “So when I came back from that residency in Iceland, I started by making the gannet. It was the first bird I made, and then I was hooked.”
These “spirit birds,” as she calls them, were inspired by all the birds killed by bird flu that Hechtman had photographed in Iceland.
“They’re very sweet, which is unlike much of my work, which usually straddles a line between elegant and horrifying,” she added.