Studio Visit: John Heron
How long have you been in this building?
3 years.Â
Where were you at before?
I was in a warehouse space called the Avant Gentlemen's Lodge.
Is it still around?
No, no. It got completely taken over from us. But our friend had us living in there for nothing for seven years, we got a good run. People are really into this space but I don't know. That place was kind of the best because you were just paying fifty dollars a month and that was perfect.
It had been a roofing factory, but it was more like a cozy building. It had two wood stoves and it just had a rustic charm for Philadelphia. In 2005 there was this place called the Atheneum in South Philly. It was this blossoming noise scene and we were friends with those guys. We would go to shows there and someone would have a TV on their head and it would just be pure noise. We liked it. We were kind of in the scene but wanted to do something a little different. We were more a little bit of theater and narrative over noise. We would put on these plays. We put on solstice parties that would last two or three days and the building kind of lent itself to that.
This is at the Avant Gentlemen's Lodge?
Yeah, it was 40th and market which was a good location too because there's not really anything there. People would get off the subway and they would walk right into our building and not know what happened. It was so nice. It had a parking lot on the side that was ours and it was gated so it was a full existence. It had barn doors on the side. I think about it and I should have been doing much larger work. I was doing miniatures in a huge space. I should have been working on bronze; something audacious.
Do you think that the spaces you've lived in and worked in have impacted your art at all?
Yeah, my work has definitely been impacted from living in spaces that were falling apart. Or they were some kind of strange cycle of, not a work in progress, but the idea of shelter. It was kind of like shelter. It was this weird situation, but it's definitely true. This space has been a difficult thing to adjust to, this whole building. I think the community here is half people working, half not, but at my old place I was living with people that were working really hard constantly.Â
Are you Philly for life?
I don't want to move to L.A. I would go to San Francisco, and I've been contemplating that forever. But L.A., I don't hate it or anything, it's just not my scene.Â
Why San Francisco?
Every time I've gone there it's been a great time. I really like hiking and camping and biking, and you can just get to that so fast. Growing up on the East Coast you watch movies, and that's how you get your idea of what California is. When I was growing up I was watching skate videos and bmx movies, and it made this complete icon of California to me: high schools where you eat outside and there's a weird plaza and you can do anything you want.Â
Every single person I know is on the West coast now. They're pitching their own show and that might be a thing where if they get it I'll have to just go out there.Â
It sounds nice to have friends who have their lives together like that.
Well, I don't know. That one's a weird one. I don't think that happens ever. Jesse's a talented guy and he is a hard worker, but I think that was half of the reason I had trouble when he left. We were good friends that were like a weird old couple because we didn't have to talk every day. We were unemployed and working on our art really hard. He would sit there and do a storyboard every single day from 8 in the morning until midnight every day and just had that true work ethic. Where I would be like: "Alright Jesse, gotta do this. I can do it." And it was hard losing that.Â
Do you think that impacts your work at all, knowing people who are making it in L.A.?
I don't know if I focus on it in my art, I've talked about this a lot recently. I've been talking about reactionary art, but it's more of a reactionary thing and that's just with life.
Your art is reactionary art?
Yeah. I shouldn't care as much as I do about the things that I do. It's just a waste of energy. In my true mind that I like to think that I have, I'm focused on positive things and I shouldn't really spend any time focusing on that stuff. Whether it subconsciously affects what I do, probably. I like to work on things where no matter what they end up being very strategic and time-oriented. I wish I could just do loose neon tape whatever, throwing stuff together, and I like a lot of abstract art, just pure play, but at the same time a lot of the work I've been doing is around things that are very time-oriented and traditional. It's really cool when I work on antiques. I like feeling these things that have been around for hundreds of years. It's a really hard balance to understand where that fits in and where other things come in from the future. What's real? Is that the new this? Or is that the same thing? It's your perception. It's just been filtered through my experience and now it's presented this other way.
Five months ago I was restoring these Catholic relics and I'm working on this stuff and I wonder what people thought of this 100 years ago, or 150 or 200 years ago? Was this just anything, like a phone or something? Now it has this crazy feeling because it's almost outsider art. They have weird, intricate patterns cut into paper and then a tooth and someone took a very fine knife and cut out the person's name and wrote in this crazy script about them. So you're touching stuff like that and then you go and see anything else and, I don't know, I don't know what that even means.Â
You mean where does that translate into the world now? Like what was that thing, since maybe it was totally normal originally?Â
It's about how you're perceiving anything. I try to get away from that when I'm working on art. The stuff I'm doing now is all based on time and that relates to a larger thing of who we are and why we think we're so important. It's more based around the idea of erosion and how we can't possibly understand time, or how time works for other things. We want everything to fit into our clock, but erosion happens and strata builds up and we don't understand that time. We can't understand it. We can compute it maybe but we can't fathom it.
We were talking the other day about the person who cut down the oldest tree in the world. It took him most of his life to come to terms with how horrible that is, cutting something down that was twice as old as written history. And it's just impossible to grasp what that could possibly be like. You have to deal with time as this concept that is that thing that affects me in only a day to day way.Â
Yeah, I've been trying to place that into my work for a while now. I'm 35 and I went to school for art but I never finished. I was touring with a band and I went to Tyler three times. I don't know if you can count the last time as an actual time. It was a semester. I went for two years and four years later I went back for another two years. I didn't really do any art through my twenties. I would doodle here and there but I didn't think about anything. I went on this trip when I was 30. I went to Spain with my then girlfriend who had grown up there. She wanted me to see her hometown so we went for 2 or 3 months and we ended up going to southern Spain and living on this commune that she had hung out at when she was 19. It was like walking into Holy Mountain.
We had hiked for a couple weeks up into the mountains off the coast and we went to this small town. We had to ask all these people where the trail was. We went through a eucalyptus grove and walked into this kind of parking lot of Mad Max motorbikes and vans and there was a midget on the ground with no legs, reading the bible in a language I didn't know. And then we just start seeing people in robes coming out with this old dude with a huge beard and he's carrying this big tray of food and he has two young women with him. I started looking around and seeing all these amazing hand-built houses. They have some of the leanings of the American hippie movement, but they're very different in their own ways. They're all built out of the canyon and the rocks. Some of them have a little bit of geodesic vibes. They're all hand built out of cob with natural streams coming down this hill. This commune has been there for 30 or 40 years. Someone just gave them 1500 acres from this mountain.
I started building all these sculptures after that. I didn't take any photos. I felt really bad taking photos. I think I took one of this guy who built a cob dome that had all these signs he had stolen from the national park around it that was really awesome. But I came back and just started making models. Total fruition, not thinking about anything, just building them. A lot of good things came out of that but after a while you get to a point where you don't want to make something where people tell you: "That's really cute" or "That's really cool." Everything is your worst enemy, and people just want that. But I don't want to do that my whole life. I want to do something that's a little more ambiguous, or not as easy to sum up so quickly. I like really ambiguous work. You don't necessarily understand that language. You've created some kind of your own language and that's what I'm looking for.
Having come back from that commune, do you feel like you're more observant of architecture?
I became kind of obsessed with it for a while. That's why I got into building. I wanted to learn everything I could about it. I was on the verge of going to architecture school and then a lot of my friends that were already in programs told me I was going to hate it.
I just took this lecture series/course at PAFA that was curated by the Wagner Museum. They're one of Philadelphia's true jewels and they're really trying to have this lecture series, like what it was originally intended for 400 years ago. It was an adult school for high culture. The course I took was amazing. I want to start a college based around this philosophy. I want these two professors to teach. I wish I had an endless bank account to just have them start a school. It was called "Avant-garde Science, Avant-garde Art". And it was an art and architecture historian paired up with an evolutionary biologist and botanist. They just fed off each other and they taught this series going back from about 600 years ago to now, focusing on the merger between science and art. But they went off on these other tangents and it was the best thing I had ever been involved in. They would branch off on some really interesting conversations about the new merger of technology, wherein lies this new situation of appropriation. And that kind of future made me really focus on the past and what people thought at certain times. and how you can just make yourself an angry dinosaur, really fast. you don't have to accept it, you don't have to ride the parade into town, but you have to understand your place, in history maybe, I'm not sure.
See more of John's work here














