Heather M. O’Brien is an artist based in Los Angeles where she is exploring how capitalist desire and militaristic legacy construct our ideas about home. Working with photographs, film, installation, performance and writing, her projects seek to build encounters around the illusion of accurate memory, familial archives and the fallacies of the American Dream. Heather’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. in venues including The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The International Center for Photography, SF Camerawork, Parsons/The New School, The Photographic Center Northwest, The Bronx River Art Center, Baxter St., Purchase College at SUNY and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her projects have been featured in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Conveyor Magazine.

Heather received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and currently teaches courses in Photography, Art History and Writing at California State University Long Beach and Moorpark College. At WSW, Heather developed a project in the letterpress studio. In 2016, she will be a resident at Sante Fe Art Institute as well as the Marble House Project in Dorset, Vermont.

Images (starting left):
the smell that permeates the sidewalk; the dust which breaks my lungs, Guavas from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, Super 8mm b&w film projection loop, 5 min, 2015

we take pictures so we can forget, Three-channel 35 mm film, 120 slides / 25 min, 2014

bits of colored cloth, Performance (25 mins), ladders, 35 mm slide projections, glass, photographs wood, lightbulb, 2013

Between apocalyptic apprehensions, and dreams of deliverance, 35 mm slide lecture and projection, 60 slides / 16 mins, on Pier 84 adjacent the Intrepid Air, Sea & Space Museum, 2013