Faye Heller’s captivating work takes the indices of the physical world and splits them up, mixes and multiplies referents to produce cool, seductively smart photomontage.

Whether she’s juxtaposing a staircase and a woman’s eyes to invoke ‘The Start of Fiction’, or a woman’s profile and a darkened room filled with unpeopled chairs in ‘The Waiting Room,’ there’s always an element of intrigue, of cinema enigma, that recalls film noir, while the crisp black and white imagery also owes something to the French New Wave.

Heller is fascinated by the mutual impact of the human and immaterial - ‘if you had one thing,…

Faye Heller’s captivating work takes the indices of the physical world and splits them up, mixes and multiplies referents to produce cool, seductively smart photomontage.

Whether she’s juxtaposing a staircase and a woman’s eyes to invoke ‘The Start of Fiction’, or a woman’s profile and a darkened room filled with unpeopled chairs in ‘The Waiting Room,’ there’s always an element of intrigue, of cinema enigma, that recalls film noir, while the crisp black and white imagery also owes something to the French New Wave.

Heller is fascinated by the mutual impact of the human and immaterial - ‘if you had one thing, for example, the image of an architectural space . . .by introducing an image of a person . . . would be the beginning of a movement.’

It is the tension between the self and space, as well as the properties of the photographic medium that work to underline it, that comes through most strongly in this work.

Heller’s process generally consists in taking source photographs from her own archives, re-photographing the images, assembling them, and then re-photographing that to come up with the final total image. The unexpected takes on reality this technique encourages is on striking view in the synoptic ‘Shipping,’ which presents a multiplicity of images taken inside a small vacant cubicle on a boat.

It is a limited field interpreted from what seems to be an infinite variety of angles, and the effect is singular. The whole is fragmented and brought back together with the shock of a new intensity. It places the viewer in that space of looking around, chopping up and recombining space in their mind. Heller’s work pushes the parameters of photography as a medium and as a concept, and she creates her own rules.

Faye Heller obtained her MFA from the Slade School in 2001, and has had solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Italy and London.