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Robert Heinecken (1931-2006) was born in Denver, CO and moved with his parents to Southern California as a youngster. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a masters degree in art in 1960 and founding the department of photography there three years later. From early on in his career, Heinecken deployed unconventional processes and an irreverent attitude toward the photographic image that flew in the face of everything the medium was supposed to be. He rarely used a camera, relying instead on appropriated imagery gathered from newspapers and illustrated magazines. Like Berman, he refused to treat art works a autonomous creations, focusing instead on "found images" that he manipulated to often witty and sarcastic effects, using techniques like lithography, etching, camera-less exposure, and photo emulsion on canvas. His perhaps most influential portfolio Are You Rea of 1964-68 was made by passing light onto photographic paper through the pages of an illustrated magazine instead of a negative.


Works in the exhibition will include some of Berman's earliest experiments in composite imagery, such as his individual verifax collages of hands holding a transistor radio with inlaid photographs, and his explorations of the interstices between image and text. It also shows Heinecken's Are you Rea portfolio, his early projection pieces and collages of pin-ups, which articulated his desire to excavate cultural meaning through multi-layered imagery. In addition examples of Berman's mail art and Semina publication will be exhibited, as well as Heinecken's magazine interventions and photo sculptures, Le Voyeur/Robbe-Grillet and Cliche Vary series, among others.