New Orleans-based artist, Sally Heller, creates unique structures that are at once familiar and strange by presenting mass-produced, disposable objects in unusual contexts. Through a process of subtle twists and turns she strips everyday detritus and disposable, low-end consumer goods of their original use-value, recycling them into organic forms that are repositioned in room-size installations, creating bizarre landscapes from the generic and proliferous discards of our disposable lifestyles. Fascinated by the poetics of contradictions, oxymorons and double entendres, Heller is less interested in her work’s inherent commentary on consumerism, waste and ecology than she is in seeing humor in our world’s plasticized realities.

The photographs provide documentation of the installations and are expressive as abstract paintings; their immediacy clearly reveals the dynamic energy that goes into building these colorful and animated installations. In the photographs, one can make out the havoc caused by nature’s powers, yet the intensity of the color and wry plastic objects evoke anything but disaster. They are highly finished and elegant objects.