Since the beginning of time humans have attempted to make sense of the world and our place in it through a variety of thought processes including art, science, religion, and material explorations across all media.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is proud to present Cosmic Trace, a four-person exhibition that explores ideas of the body and our relationship to the world through a spectrum of materials and methodologies. Art practices that dip in and out of magic and science to grapple with how we illustrate and decipher meaning. The exhibition includes a selection of works by Mary Beth Heffernan, Mary Little, Astri Swendsrud and Melissa Walter.

In Cosmic Trace, we see four contemporary makers step through a range of portals in search of meaning. Mary Beth Heffernan explores questions of physicality and representation in her exquisite photograms, observing “like the photograph itself, cremains are an alchemic state suspended between presence and absence.” Melissa Walter explores representations of the body through sensitive minimalist drawings that reference DNA coding, while at the same time remaining mindful not to completely obscure the artist’s touch and the beauty of the handmade. In the work of Mary Little, minimalist abstraction, landscape and the body collide conceptually and coalesce into a gravitational dance of light, surface, and pattern in her fabric wall installations. Finally, the idea of patterns, wavelengths and the various conceptual and psychological tensions created by the search for meaning in a seemingly chaotic world are deftly rendered in The Receiver sculptures presented by Astri Swendsrud. Within the varied processes there is a sympathetic magic to the way these four artists’ bodies of work dance around similar regions of thought that perhaps get us just a little closer to an understanding of our place within this universe.

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Mary Beth Heffernan is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores the interplay of corporeality and images. She earned her MFA in Photography at the California Institute of the Arts, and was a Studio Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Heffernan is currently Professor of Sculpture, Photography and Interdisciplinary Art at Occidental College. In 2019 Heffernan’s lauded PPE Portrait Project was put on permanent exhibit at the Welcome Collection in London. She was awarded the inaugural 2016-7 PAC/LA Contemporary Artist Grant as Artist-in-Residence at The Huntington Library. In 2010, Heffernan earned the COLA Master Artist Fellowship. Her work has been supported by grants from the Photographic Arts Council/LA, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Durfee Foundation, and Light Work. Heffernan’s work has been reviewed in The Times (London,) the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Ratio, Public Radio International, CSNBC, LA Review of Books, the LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Art Issues, and pictured in the New York Times. Heffernan’s art is included in numerous private and public collections, including The Huntington Library, Arts Collections, and Botanical Gardens, the Hammer Museum Grunwald Center Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Light Work of Syracuse, NY, and the New York City Library.

marybethheffernan.com
@marybethheffernanstudio

Mary Little was born in Northern Ireland and moved to the United States in 2001 to take up a teaching position at California College the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. Trained as a furniture designer at London’s Royal College of Art, she has always approached her work as sculpture. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Vitra Design Museum in Basel and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Her commissions and gallery works have been acquired for private collections in Europe and North America, as well as public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Little’s work has most recently been reviewed in Architectural Digest, Galerie, and Surface magazines. She is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and lives in Los Angeles.

marylittle.com
@marylittlestudio 

Astri Swendsrud is a Los Angeles-based artist whose multi-disciplinary practice investigates the formation of meaning, belief, interpretation and transformation. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including JOAN, Visitors Welcome Center, Richard Telles Fine Art, General Projects and the Vincent Price Museum, Swendsrud is also part of the collaborative project Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, and their book The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s Guidebook was published by Insert Blanc Press in 2018. Swendsrud is a co-founder and co-director of Elephant Art Space in Los Angeles, and she is Associate Professor of Art at Biola University. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2008.

astriswendsrud.com
@alswendsrud

Melissa Walter is best known for her optically stimulating sculptures of twisting paper and drawings of detailed geometric patterns, Walter visually explores concepts concerning Astronomy and astrophysical theories. Walter has worked as a graphic designer and science illustrator for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and as a team member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her experience has inspired her to visually articulate wonders of the Universe, such as black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, dark matter and more recently, dark energy. Walter has recently completed an artist in residence program at Bread & Salt and participated in exhibitions at the San Diego Art Institute, Torrance Art Museum, Helmuth Projects and the San Diego International Airport for a temporary exhibition titled Intergalactic Dreaming in 2017. She received her BFA, cum laude from the University of Rhode Island in 1998.

melissawalterart.com
@_melissa.walter_