Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce 24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana, an exhibition of new paintings by Andrea Joyce Heimer that will run from March 26 - April 9, 2022 at their Glassell Park gallery, located at 2700 W Ave 34, Los Angeles, CA, 90046. 24 Hours aggregates twenty-four 30”x40” paintings that represent each hour of the day Heimer lost her virginity.
Poignancy and humor imbue Heimer’s serialized narrative, centered on the encounter that made Heimer “a woman, albeit a disappointed one,” as she writes in her statement on the series. But the virginity loss itself, which occurs at noon, is depicted with restraint. Within the painting, it is relegated to a small section of a busy composition that otherwise teems with life and activity—his grandmother knitting on the floor above the young couple, planes flying in the sky above her, geese pecking at her garden beyond. And within the series as a whole, sex itself is diminished by the sheer quantity of other exuberant moments, like the 9 A.M. hustle and bustle of the school ground. The expected catharsis brought by what is so commonly trafficked as the watershed moment of young adulthood for women is but one of many features in this intricate portrait of a day. 
Heimer’s painterly style evokes narrative friezes, wherein each work’s composition is segmented into a series of layers that depict various planes of action. Her approach to perspective borrows from techniques of pre-modern image-making, abandoning illusionistic space for narrative condensation. The importance of narrativity—of what Heimer’s paintings communicate, and how—is reflected in her work’s titles. The titles are long, expository, and heartfelt, constituting a confessional writing practice that runs parallel to her painting. For instance, the painting representing her virginity loss is titled: 12:00 p.m.: During the peak of the chinook my boyfriend and I cut school to make out in his grandmother’s cement basement, in the house near the truck stop. She is infirm and can’t make it down the stairs. My boyfriend wants to have sex, which would make this my first time, and I say no and yes back and forth because I am afraid of getting pregnant but I also want my boyfriend to love me forever. He decides for me and I yelp at the surprise of it all. I guess now I am a woman.. The titles read like diary entries, and impart upon each work a sense of predestined dread not immediately legible in the painting. For example, Heimer titles a work depicting male figures engaged in a snowball fight amid a snowy landscape 7:00 a.m.: Inexplicably, I wake up depressed. I am late for school. It is cold but a warm purple wind tussles my ponytail and I know this means a chinook will melt away some of the snow this afternoon. Two idiots pummel each other with snowballs while they still can. Images that might otherwise be read with a sense of cozy comfort turn acerbic when framed by Heimer’s titles.
Though 24 Hours is a conceptually unique project, Heimer has long used experiences from her own life to explore the underbelly of human emotion, most frequently depicting the various shades of loneliness. But while her subjects experience pain, jealousy, isolation, and — in the case of 24 Hours — an acute disappointment that is destined to be repeated, her paintings remain full of humans, animals, homes and hills, full of a heartening interest in a deeply interconnected world.
