Andrea Joyce Heimer Alone With Our Reflections At 100 Lakes, 2024

Alone with Our Reflections at 100 Lakes is an acrylic and pencil painting on wood panel.

The work is characterized by many small lakes, which reflect the purple-pink sky at twilight as well as the faces of individual figures sitting at their banks. Fish jump in and out of the small puddles of water, which are ringed by trees and dirt paths. One can see the footsteps on some of the paths, which lead from the mountains to the characters examining their reflections in the lakes. A heavy red sun and rainbow dominate the background, as if capturing the moments right after a storm.

This painting is inspired by two stories from Heimer’s life. The first one is from her childhood, during which she experienced a lot of social isolation in her adopted family. One Summer when Heimer was eight years old, when she and her family were staying with her grandmother in a rural cabin in Montana, they went for a drive and found an impossibly clear lake. Looking into the lake, she was startled to see all the way to the large fish swimming all the way at the bottom, rather than seeing her own reflection. The experience was also strangely familiar in the sense that it reminded her of how invisible she felt in her family. The second story relates to her current life in Washington State. Unlike Montana, there are no large wild expanses, but rather nature in a manicured and controlled state in the form of parks and preserves. In this context even when one seeks solitude and quiet in nature there is always someone else around the corner seeking the same.

One sees both stories very clearly in the painting in the fact that the characters all walk down from the mountain to look at their reflections in these clear lakes, and in the fact that they are so close to one another physically and yet too wrapped up in their own images to engage with one another.