Resurrection of a Victim
The 2023 Linda Lee Alter Fellow Exhibition
AN EXHIBITION BY Heather Marie Scholl
Exhibition Runs NOVEMBER 1 - 19
Panel Discussion: “Mythos of Safety” Saturday, November 11 from 1 - 3pm AT DVAA — REGISTER HERE
About the exhibition:
Heather Marie Scholl’s solo exhibition Resurrection of a Victim is a reimagining of medieval illuminated manuscripts, triptychs, and altar pieces that subverts the patriarchal and religious dominance implicit in these mediums with a naked telling of queer desire, abuse, identity, and healing. This comprehensive body of work, completed over the last four years, examines how experiences of intimate partner violence and childhood abuse are situated within family histories, community context, and racial and gender identities.
Historically, medieval European illuminated manuscripts, portable altars, and triptychs were used as both private and public devotional objects for education, spiritual connection, and creative expression centered around Christian doctrine. Scholl’s work usurps the grandiosity and reverence of these objects while complicating binary notions of morality and victim-perpetrator roles by addressing the ways abuse can play out in queer relationships.
These works invite intimacy and reflection through intricately embroidered illustrations and poetry. A Warrior’s Birth, for example, is centered around a bold scene of a mermaid deity fighting off zoomorphized versions of abusers. For You, Everything recreates the experience of falling in love — both rapturous and ominous — in part through an effigy of the artist suspended from the center of the piece with limbs contorted in sensual yet impossible shapes. The embroidered illuminated manuscripts take on a playful tone while articulating experiences of betrayal, fantasy, frustrated desire, and rage.
By examining questions of violence, healing, queerness and agency with nuance, Scholl's work resolutely claims space for all, crafting a public place for a collective queering of healing.
The exhibition will be on view in Gallery 1 at Da Vinci Art Alliance from November 1 - November 19 with an opening reception on Saturday, November 4th from 4 - 7pm and a closing artist talk on Sunday, November 19 from 12-2pm.
ABOUT the artist:
Heather Marie Scholl is a Philadelphia-based artist using embroidery, sculpture, and writing to confront personal and national legacies of violence, exposing narratives of race, gender, and trauma. She creates intimate works informed by family histories, research on race in America, queerness, and her internal emotional landscape that invite inter-generational healing. Utilizing a disquieting vulnerability she investigates how these histories are woven into our bodies, homes, rituals, and daily lives, and how they bleed into the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. Scholl holds a BA in Race, Gender and Sexuality and an MFA in Fashion and Knitwear Design. She was a 2019-20 fellow with the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship and a resident at The James and Janie Washington House (2019). She has been awarded the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant (2014), CERF+ grant (2021), and the Illuminate the Arts Grant (2022). Her work has been exhibited at Fuller Craft Museum, Rokeby Museum, The Morris Jumel Mansion, and DaVinci Art Alliance, among others and has been written about in Slate, Cosmopolitan, i-D magazine, and BUST.