In yesterday's Chicago Tribune, critic Lori Waxman reviewed the exhibition Love Letters to Antarctica, at Swimming Pool Project Space. In her review she mistakenly attributed Annie Heckman's video, "Letter to a lost penguin," to artist Lorien Jordan, also in Love Letters to Antarctica. It's a mistake we've all made, whether publicly or privately. I remember embarrassing myself back when I was a student in a community college photography class nearly half my life ago, by attributing Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now to Stanley Kubrick. I know, terrible, right? But we've all done it, haven't we?

In some ways this error could be taken as a compliment: that the exhibition is so cohesive, the individual identities of the artists involved become conflated. There is certainly good reason for this; both artists' work is about Antarctica, and both contain imagery of penguins. What Waxman may have missed is that Heckman's installation, "A letter which did not reach its destination," functions in large part as a climactic epilogue to the video, "Letter to a lost penguin." The penguin itself is present, in just about the crudest form possible: a foam block, which Heckman carved and painted by tracing a direct projection from the animation. It sat unobtrusively in a dark corner of the installation, and to be fair it was easy to miss. (Someone pointed it out to me at the opening.)

Heckman discussed this crudity of rendering in her artist's talk (Sunday, August 22nd, 2pm, at Swimming Pool), and the issue of awkward rendering in general. Her materials are simple, in some cases the common products a child might use in a craft project (paper, barbeque skewers, and string) and in others specialized industrial products (a coating compound called Winterstone, and rather costly industrial-grade phosphorescent paint). Heckman's rendering has always had a childlike awkwardness to it, from the dead, decomposing mouse in her 2007 animation "Becoming Formless," which was my first exposure to her work, to the current exhibition. This awkwardness is one of the parameters within which Heckman works, a limitation perhaps (like all parameters) but never a failed attempt at doing something else.

Illusion and realism are something I aspire to in my own work, and it's not easy. Realistic representation is a great challenge for an artist's skill, and it is seems strange that some of the artists who "ooh and ah" us with their amazing verisimilitude, such as Koons and Piccinini, actually delegate the tough challenges to studio assistants. When Waxman refers to Heckman's installation as "DIY," then, she's on to more than she knows. Not that Heckman's afraid to outsource (I helped install the blackout curtains, for example) but she isn't showing anything of which she isn't capable of doing for herself.

Waxman's criticism of Heckman's installation, that it "wants to be fantastical but is, unfortunately, too scrappy to pull it off," is a fair point, but one that misses the mark of what the work is about. High polish and verisimilitude are undeniably impressive when done right: Gottfried Helnwein's "Child" paintings, Jeff Koons' faux-inflatables, or Patricia Piccinini's eerily uncanny monsters would all fall flat if their slickly unquestionable surfaces were any less perfect. This isn't what Heckman's after, and to dissect her work on a technical level is so far off the mark as to remind me of that old Kids in the Hall sketch about what a lousy carpenter Jesus was.

That the installation is "scrappy," "like a kindergartener's version of the South Pole," is an accurate observation, but also a misguided one. Heckman's perspective is that a too-perfect presentation becomes oppressive, a Fascist Disneyland in which only one interpretation is possible. Instead of outsourcing her work to a cadre of Imagineers, like Koons' or Piccinini's studio assistants, who create seamless but sterile illusions, Heckman does her own dirty work. Heckman isn't a skill-based artist, in the sense of those of us, myself included, who seek in part to show off their draftsmanship and craft, with a sort of "Look what I can do!" Rather, she's a visual storyteller, using the language she has available to her in order to say what she has to say. Awkward and childlike perhaps, her video and installation work are about a personal narrative transposed into a world that is absolutely fantastical, not despite this awkwardness but in part because of it.Love Letters to Antarctica is on view at Swimming Pool Project Space through September 12th. If you can't make it to the show, you can view Annie Heckman's video, "Letter to a lost penguin," on YouTube.For some other views on this exhibition, check out Paul Germanos' review on Chicago Critical, Lauren Weinberg's review on Time Out Chicago, and Darrel Roberts' review on Chicago Art Examiner, as well as my own review which is scheduled to appear in the Fall 2010 issue (both online and print editions) of Art Pulse.

Jeriah is an artist, educator, writer, and snack enthusiast. You can read his columns at Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Magazine. Jeriah lives and works in Chicago, with his wife Stephanie Burke.