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One couldn’t be blamed for mistaking artist and filmmaker Frank Heath for a time traveler sent back with the impossible task of figuring out where it all went wrong. Government surveillance? Technological arms races? Nuclear fallout or an act of God? Each as plausible as the last if you’re inclined to believe what Heath uncovers across an array of conspiratorial prank phone calls, metadocumentaries, and room-shaking music videos.
Heath’s work can be seen as a part of a post-9/11 aesthetic shift in art away from subjectivity that curator Paolo Cirio refers to as evidentiary realism, which aims to make visible the complex networks of capital and bureaucracy that construct our reality. Grounded in rigorous journalistic research, Heath uses historical events, declassified materials, and government facilities as the backdrop for a cast of real-life characters who are more often than not in the middle of doing their job. The videos often resemble portraiture, catalyzed by conversations with customer service and caretakers of hidden spaces. We learn intimate details about attitudes and interiorities of Heath’s subjects. All the while, it’s unclear if they’re coconspirators in Heath’s agenda or simply playing along because of their obligations to their employers.
In Heath’s phone call videos, an actor speaks with real people to file fake complaints or order bizarre custom products. Elsewhere, a “documentary” crew searches through a KMart while working on a project about the Large Hadron Collider. This playful mix of documentary, fiction, and improvisation infuses Heath’s work with its signature uncanny and comedic tone. Heath deploys this humor to push bureaucratic capitalism past its ability to anticipate the needs of consumers, forcing its functionaries to answer questions beyond the scope of their duties into the realm of the implausible where phone booths spout molten metal.
We first highlighted Heath’s films in 2013 in our “& Other Works” series organized by C. Spencer Yeh. In the thirteen years since, Heath has continued tirelessly producing films that reflect back to us the absurdity, doom, and humor of our time. Wrong Number offers a comprehensive four part series showcasing an almost complete retrospective of Heath’s diverse oeuvre. Spectacle is thrilled to host the world premiere of Heath’s latest work, A REAL GREY AREA, as well as the second ever screening of Heath’s critically under-seen, landscape horror film, CENTRALIA.
From burial rites, to spy networks, to numerology and gene banks, Heath probes at what lies below the surface of our world and of ourselves. His films are at times portentous, at others hilarious and often a mix of both. A sense of synchronicity suffuses his work — a feeling that there’s no such thing as a wrong number.