Sally Heller (CRF 2013) is currently featured in Our Point in Space at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana, on view until August 16, 2025. Her work is also part of the 2025 edition of Louisiana Contemporary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, which opened this week and runs through January 4, 2026. Louisiana Contemporary is an annual juried survey exhibition that recognizes the spectrum and vitality of artistic voices emanating from New Orleans and art communities across Louisiana.
Currently working with two mediums, wall sculpture and large-scale installation, Heller explores the playful and architectural, and finds magic in the everyday. Her laser-cut acrylic wall sculptures echo the language of the digital age, mimicking emoticons and texting shorthand. In her installations, low-end materials—fabric, netting, wire, and bric-a-brac—become immersive environments of intersecting spheres and planes. Drawn lines of yarn and rope move the eye up and around the ever-changing surface. Increasingly, Sally is also incorporating video projection, layering movement and narrative into physical space.
Sally’s recent projection piece, IN MID-AIR, grew in part from the deep reflection and inspiration she experienced during her time at Civitella. The video weaves together decades-old home movies with hypnotic, slow-motion footage of a trapeze artist—an image she has revisited for over 20 years. Black-and-white Mardi Gras scenes and images of home life dissolve into faded color from 8mm movies, their age damage left untouched as a testament to the fragility of memory. The work asks: Can time even exist without memory?
“My time spent at Civitella gave me the thought power to focus on my work in a unique way. The landscape, the time, the inspiring fellows who were present increased my aspirations. Towards my work and deepened my thought processes. In this video (my first projection), I combine the footage of family movies from the 60s and the 30s along with the image of a acrobatic aerialist who spins his magic across the decades and scenes present in these films.” Heller reflects, “Much like being at Civitella, one can find magic in realism.”