Heidi Schwegler is an artist working in a variety of media, most frequently sculpture and video. She is concerned with the impermanent nature of the corporeal, the surprising resilience of the discarded, and the inevitability of decay. She is transfixed by the damaged, the overworked and overwrought. Schwegler’s work champions vulnerability—she finds objects that are transformed, even mangled, and preserves them in a more permanent, albeit altered, state. But it's a strange sort of championing; at times she causes the vulnerability. Her interest in the natural decay of humanity’s ephemera leads her, at points, to be the demolisher as well as the guardian of the discarded.

She has a complex relationship with craft. At times she rejects it. At other points, she uses her great knowledge of craft to expertly subvert form and function. Above all, Schwegler’s art is about the idea of the tragic, and ultimately, of the human.

Schwegler is a significant artist of the Pacific Northwest. She is a Hallie Ford Fellow (2010) as well as Associate Chair of the MFA in Applied Craft + Design, a joint program offered through the Oregon College of Art and Craft and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Botched Execution: Selected Works by Heidi Schwegler 2004-2015 presents a selection of works created over the past decade, with several works recreated as site-specific pieces for the Art Gym.

Venue: Art Gym at Marylhurst University
On View: April 7 – May 15, 2015