These days it is hard to distinguish reality from fiction as endless streams of manipulated images distort and deceive with an unholy alliance of fabricated form and false meaning. Kati Heck’s paintings, sculptures, and installations disrupt this frisson of the familiar and the faux with a contrary counter-narrative that works against the grain to resist, unsettle, and trouble our understanding of modern experience.

The installation loosely resembles the central and side panels of a polyptych altarpiece or perhaps the backdrop and scrims of a stage. Artifice, deception, and hybridity rule as all around shape-shifting figures, modeled by family and friends of the artist, enact inscrutable scenarios alongside human/animal amalgams, while nearby a sculpted “manhole” lets off steam!

In this performative theatrical space, fluid brushwork and a meticulous realist technique seduce with an appealing subterfuge that artfully disguises Heck’s interrogation of the ways cultural values circulate and intertwine with belief. On one wall, three Monsters named Juno, self, and kid, schuppig recall Hieronymus Bosch’s hybrid fusion of animal and human form. With their imaginative mix of cross-breeding and transgressive deviation these playful yet strange so-called monsters could stand in for outsiders, whether they are refugees, illegal aliens, or simply those whose non-conforming bodies resist dominant power.

— Susan Canning