Press

“Heyward has not yet been fully acknowledged in terms of her artistic legacy. Her uninhibited vocal performances had enormous impact on the works of Ericka Beckman, Mike Kelley and Michael Smith, among many others.. This exhibition was, I hope, the first of many to show off her ‘blue period’ – bold, rambunctious and unapologetic.”

“In these early videos, Ms. Heyward works alone and doesn’t need backup. She’s powerful, with the charisma of a diva and the gut- punch timing of a Lenny Bruce.”

“The future of art DVD's may well belong to interactive feature films like those that the new-media artists Toni Dove and Julia Heyward are developing for DVD-ROM.”

“Most of the works in this show succeed. The film-based pieces are dizzyingly provocative. Julia Heyward's ‘Miracles in Reverse,’ an interactive DVD-ROM, lets the viewer navigate through wildly looping and intersecting filmic stories. Drag and click the mouse, and you can change the story line, or the camera angle, or the speed at which you view the piece....The film works like memory, obsessively looping back to painful moments, fading out here and ramping up there. This must be what it's like inside Heyward's head. It's a dark, harrowing piece, and the technology works in its favor.”

“The most compelling works are driven by a vision that transcends cyberspace. Julia Heyward's ‘Miracles in Reverse’ is an ambitious challenge to classic cinematic technique. By clicking and dragging a mouse, the viewer can access a trio of characters and manipulate episodes from their lives ...The meaning of those recollections, along with their sequence and musical accompaniment, will be different for each person who participates in the artwork. At once family album and surrealistic nightmare, ‘Miracles in Reverse’ turns narrative order into stream-of-consciousness chaos.”

“True to the 1990's, ‘Miracles in Reverse’ is about recovered memories, minus the usual sentimentality or cynicism. With grace and tenderness and subtly exact pacing, it floats between the matter of fact and the mysterious.”

“It's one thing to go to a sci-fi cabaret and cobble up a few skits taken from the outer space myths of the past; it's entirely another thing to put on a show of effects, costumes, slides and choreography – subtitled ‘A Cartoon Opera’ – that hold together for over an hour with something that contributes to the Newspeak of Cyberpunk. Heyward is definitely one artist to look for in the future... provided she isn't there already.”

“Heyward's recent show at the Ohio Theater in Soho was a brilliant hi-tech rock show. Films, slides and props were all utilized as visual accompaniments to her band- the driving, country inflected T-Venus.. new ground is being broken here.”

“Where  Anderson has always presented herself as a waif ... Heyward is dangerous, her performance stance a threat.”

“Paradoxically hectic and dreamlike, there's a reflexive-associatiove-constructivist method to this madness which, in conjunction with random brilliance, makes for a properly adventurous prototpye for an emergent form. Heyward focuses on a few weighty issues – evolution. regression and the end of the world – and handles them with appropriate wit and multidimensionality. Where David Bowie left off with his ‘Ahes to Ashes’ promo video, Heyward forges into the deepest concept album territory, unleasing a sensual barrage replete with symbols, nonsymbols, neat packages and untidy paradoxes.”

“Using only a body-mic and a few slides, Heyward spun an often hilarious stream-of-consciousness monologue interrupted by an odd singing ... which she blends with the mastery of a diva-a demented diva, to be sure. What was most impressive about Heyward was the way she made of this private scenario a seamless flow of disjointed activities. It was a performance not of a role but of a self  – the externalization, one could only conclude, of a very strange mind.”

“Miss Heyward's work obviously invites comparisons to Laurie Anderson. In fact, Heyward's work is technically cruder but emotionally more intense in its concern for nuclear peril, the pervasive influence of television and personal religious iconography.”

“Like an extended music video as fever dream, Heyward’s ten songs... are interspersed by her signature a cappella-like monologues, in a pig’s mask or dressed as a clown. A novel concept for the medium and a fascinating document, '360' was never transferred to videodisc nor released, a reminder that the best work often courts failure without expectation.”