12 OCTOBER - 4 NOVEMBER
FRONT GALLERY

ORSON HEIDRICH
INTERPRETER

Mechanical Advantage is an exhibition by Orson Heidrich which explores the relationship between artist and industry.

Mechanical Advantage presents a body of sculptural and wall-based works, produced by large-scale manufacturing systems, that operate both as tools for creation and as artworks themselves, existing between functional and aesthetic art objects. Heidrich is interested in the creation of value through cultural systems that distinguish artistic commodity from a working object. Positioning himself as a ‘complex manufacturer’ acting as interface between industry and art world, Heidrich collaborates with and outsources to an interdependent network of industrial manufacturing processes in the creation of his works.

The starting point for this body of work is a series of photographs taken by the artist, on his iPhone at a variety of fabrication workshops, factories, & sites where he has developed artworks over the past four years. These images are then manipulated and translated into three-dimensional forms through processes of digital and physical extrusion. The resulting physicalised objects morph between being finite aesthetic artworks – reliefs, sculptures, wall-hangings and functional tools used in the ongoing creation of work – moulds, press plates and cast models. In which the final sculptural works are objects abstracted from their initial image-forms, aesthetically marked by their machine-based production methods.

Necessarily relying on industrial availability, Australia’s dependence on overseas markets makes Heidrich’s work referent to the state of contemporary Australian standing and the varying material and political histories of inflation, geopolitics, access, and value; whereby Heidrich’s works prompt us to consider value, production and reproduction in a globalised world.

Artist bio

Orson Heidrich (Born Sydney / Eora, 1996) is a mixed media, contemporary artist living and working out of Sydney. Having completed a BA of Design in Photography and Situated Media at UTS, Heidrich’s work spans between various platforms and mediums; from contemporary photography and moving image to modern, industrial sculpture and technical installation.

Using various mediums from diversified sources, Heidrich explores the compelling relationships between artist, artist-capital and industry. His works reflect this through the sourcing, fabricating and manipulating of processes that takes place in conjunction with the community and networks built in these collaborations. Heidrich embraces the interdependence within these practical networks and recognises these processes as the art itself.

By recognising and utilising the contemporary space between industry connections and industrial mediums, Heidrich adopts these elements as a tool to examine the world around him; and ultimately form, fabricate and manipulate various components to produce mixed media, installation heavy artworks.

Photography: Brianna Speight