Track 16 is pleased to present the Los Angeles premiere of Laura Heit’s Two Ways Down, a hand-drawn, animated installation that takes a look inside the moment of a natural disaster. Reflecting on the momentary nature of life, Heit’s fantastical piece uses thrown shadows from table top dioramas and reflected and refracted animated projections to create a fleeting world where human-animal hybrids, specters, and body parts flit across the walls. Laura Heit is a multidisciplinary artist whose work intersects with performance, animation, puppetry, installation, and video. She was the co-director of the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts, and currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Heit will be exhibiting Future Readers, a new series of unique cyanotypes on paper. She created these cyanotypes, a process developed 19th century, using cut paper and drawings, completely in the dark, very intuitively. Heit says, “Searching for a way to connect in these dystopian times, I created a series of friends and open conversations. They are part mind reader, part confidant.”

Also showing is Blueshifter, an animated digital video. Heit describes the theme, "Blue is the color of our future, the shift in frequency of light of objects in space moving towards us. Blueshifter considers unreachable hypothetical stars and offers a new view of that which we cannot see with the naked eye, where images sent back from the outer reaches of space are not seen as mere scientific truth but deeply layered with our collective curiosity. Using light as tool for image making, this sequence embraces marking time, improvisation, and action with UV rays. Connecting the inner reaches of the subconscious and the outer reaches of the conjectural universe, these indigo celestial bodies represent a speculative archaeology.”

Heit’s films and installations have been seen at: Adams and Ollman (Portland), The Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene), the Boise Art Museum, She Works Flexible (Houston), REDCAT, the Walker Art Center, MOMA, Millennium Film (NYC), the Pompidou, TBA Festival Portland, and the Guggenheim Museum. She was a 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and has received grants and awards including: Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, Henson Foundation (2009, 2014), ARC California, Illinois Arts Council, Puppeteers of America, Thames and Hudson, The British Council, and the MacDowell Colony.