5/18—6/8. 2025
Tuning between presence and absence, Deborah Hede’s Shadow Shadow moves through sites of contingency, like the archive, to trace the unknown through chance, fracture, and drift.
Cast by form and shaped by light, a shadow is always an index of relation. Shadow Shadow brings together works by Deborah Hede, Luchita Hurtado, and Lee Mullican that consider the shadow as both a perceptual and psychic structure, where meaning takes form through chance, proximity, and the unresolved.
In Jungian terms, the shadow names what the self can’t claim: disowned traits, latent desires, unseen bonds beyond conscious control. Within the frame of the archive, this offers a way of thinking about what lingers unspoken or unlinked, like a field of deferred correspondence that nonetheless shape perception.
Among Hurtado and Mullican’s library are several references to Jung, including his introduction to The I Ching (Book of Changes), where he outlines a method for letting significance surface through close attention to chance. Jung described this process as a way to make room for what can’t be summoned or directed by intention alone. “The method,” he writes, “consists in observing the chance details…” In this light, archives articulate most clearly when their patterns appear according to their own logic.
Hede formally engages these relations as her mended sculpture holds more space then its shadow suggests. Her monochrome charcoal drawings, many made after night walks through the New Mexican foothills, render the earth’s shadow as a densely textured threshold. Following Hede’s move to Los Angeles she continued this inquiry in the larger drawings shown alongside charcoal works by Hurtado during her years in New Mexico, which recently returned from the Harwood Museum in Taos. Passing from New Mexico to Southern California, Hede and Hurtado’s gestures of shadow meet here; alongside two works from the 1940’s by Lee Mullican.
The conversation that follows sheds light on Hede’s practice, tracing how artistic and archival practices might stay attuned to what evades certainty. Rather than imposing a fixed coherence, the shadow reminds us that refusing to control or neatly resolve is itself an act of care by honoring what resists possession.
Interview with Deborah Hede
Deborah Hede’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions with Extended Play, Pacific Palisades; Shoot The Lobster, Los Angeles; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Santa Monica Prefecture; and Ambach and Rice, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, and is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, among others. Hede lives and works in Santa Monica, California.
Untitled, 1990
Ink and graphite on paper
24 x 19 inches
Shadow Landscape II, 2003
Charcoal, graphite
39-1/2 x 27-1/2 inches
Shadow photo series
Digital reproduction
Dimensions vary
Untitled, 1946
Charcoal on board
17 ⅝ x 11 ⅜ inches
a space surrounding an interval of time, 2025
Wire, bandaging, plaster, adhesive
28 x 109 x 17 inches
Deborah Hede, Night Sky, 1999–charcoal on paper, 11-¼ x 18 inches
Shadow photo series
Digital reproduction
Dimensions vary
The Place without Shadow, (undated)
Silver gelatin print; unique
4 ⅝ x 3 ⅝ inches
Framed: 8 ⅜ x 6 ⅝ x 1 3/16 inches
Dream of the White Place, Abiquiu, 2000
Monotype
30 x 22 inches
Untitled, c. 1970s
Charcoal on paper
23 ⅞ x 17 x ⅞ inches
Shadow Landscape I, 2003
Charcoal, graphite, white pencil
39-1/2 x 27-1/2 inches
Shadow photo series
Digital reproduction
Dimensions vary
Night Impression, Tesuque, 1999
Charcoal on paper
11-1/4" x 16-¼”
Night Shadows, 1999
Charcoal on paper
11-1/4" x 16-¼”
Untitled, 1947
Ink on paper
8 1/4 x 10 3/4 inche
Photography: Paul Salveson