Art of Texts: Heather Szatmary's latest works trace connections between data and relationships

Texting can be profound.

“To be super transparent, I’m a single woman living alone,” said artist Heather Szatmary, whose stunningly beautiful and deeply personal new exhibition “how much is not enough” opens Friday at Rule of Three (Ro3) Gallery, 915 Montgomery St. “And I think the pandemic made [it] more clear to me, [that] my connection to people has to happen outside of my home. I don’t have a partner to come home to and talk about my day with.

“So, those friendships, now especially, occur over my phone more than anything,” she added.

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You might be asking how texting and art relate. For Szatmary, it’s about data collection, and how that data can be translated into the visual realm. The process, the artist admits, is “incredibly convoluted,” starting with numbers on spreadsheets, entering that information into the 3D animation program Maya, flattening it and converting it to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, before finally transferring it to the substrate, often wood panels, upon which she painstakingly traces her final design via a projector.

The resulting artworks are not only full of meaning, but also a pleasure to look at in and of themselves.

“This analyzing of data is just fascinating to me,” said Ro3 Gallery Director Stephanie Forbes. “And putting it in a contemporary arts form, the texting back and forth, was really intriguing. I didn’t realize it was about so much more.”

The art of texts

In some ways the exhibition is broken up into two distinct but interrelated parts, a perfect fit for the gallery space given its two-room orientation. The “Text Series” occupies one of the rooms, and includes visual analysis of various conversations over periods of time determined by the artist.

"Text Series, Baskin 2008-22,” for example, chronicles the back and forth between Szatmary and a friend from the man’s first text to her (which happened to be the first text he’d ever sent) until June of this year.

“Text Series, Rebecca + Heather + Paul + Ben + Greg + Nate,” meanwhile, is a visual interpretation of a group text featuring a particularly active period of communication between the creative and her friends.

“You see this spike?” Szatmary asked as she pointed to a dynamic portion of the piece. “This was Trump’s first State of the Union. I went to bed, because I can’t stand to listen to him, but everybody was drinking and live texting. I woke to 163 or 65 texts in the morning.”

“So a lot of these I don’t remember…what we were texting about,” she noted. “But this one has this moment of memory in it for me.”

The other room in the gallery is made up mostly of another of Szatmary’s counting obsessions: Sexual encounters. The “Sex Series” includes a dozen smaller works, an animation, and some wearable art that qualifies as jewelry, wonderfully incorporating the use of “Shrinky Dinks,” an addition to the show that the artists credits to her friend and fellow creative Rubi McGrory.

“This started off as a commission for a friend who has an erotic art collection,” she related. “And his idea was for me to look at my sex life.”

Unlike the text message pieces, the numbers from which she’s working are estimates, rather than absolute accountings, of her sexual encounters over the course of 12 years. Instead of wood panels, these pieces are drawn on translucent Yupo paper, a material not unlike Mylar, and layering them atop abstracted photographs of the artist’s body.

“It’s super vulnerable,” Forbes opined.

“A lot of that is the five years I was dating my boyfriend,” added Szatmary. “But some of those are friends that I happened to have casual sex with.”

Beyond the Text Series and Sex Series works, the artist has also created a large-scale mural on the walls of the gallery, a further investigation into the themes covered in “Text Series Baskin 2008-22,” in this case with the undulations in the work based on who was texting who at any given moment. All and all the show is both personal and universal and, perhaps most of all, beautiful.

“It’s kind of about feeling alone,” said Szatmary about the exhibition. “But this provides me that evidence that I’m not alone, and that it is enough, even if I’m questioning if it’s not enough.”

Rob Hessler is an artist, executive director of arts advocacy organization Bigger Pie. He can be reached at give@robhessler.com.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Heath Szatmary's art exhibition attempts an answer. How much is enough?