Alex Heilbron: All Systems Fail
September 13 - October 25, 2025
Opening reception: September 13, 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
as-is is pleased to present Alex Heilbron: All Systems Fail, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist. Presented in conjunction with New Works by Phyllis Green, both exhibitions will open on Saturday, September 13, with an artists’ reception from 2:00 to 5:00 PM.
It can be easy to forget the physicality of painting, especially today. Not just that paintings are material things (usually), but that they’re a physical kind of communication. I can say the phrase “paintings communicate physically,” but it’s another thing to stand in front of an artist’s work, quiet down the verbal parts of my mind, and listen with the intuition of my body. Digital worlds increasingly shape how we communicate and make meaning today. They encourage us to prioritize verbal, symbolic ways of thinking, at a loss to our embodied intuition. This distinction is becoming more and more significant as developments in AI lead us to question what, if anything, differentiates organic and artificial ways of knowing.
In All Systems Fail, Alex Heilbron presents six large scale paintings born from the confluence of our physical and digital realities. Working from images found online, she enlarges and crops pictures of resonant things like leaves, faces, and flowers, obsessively burrowing into them at a pixelated level, using her intuition to find an underlying structure. She then meticulously rounds, adjusts, and modifies the borders of these forms, edge by edge, to produce a vector file that can be read by a vinyl cutter. Once she’s assembled a collective group of structures, she prints them and lays their vinyl embodiments over the canvas. She then pours and brushes paint over these digitally native stencils to build up a complex epidermal surface, before removing the vinyl like a used band-aid. The outcome is painstakingly handmade yet delimited by digital systems.
Her incredibly time-consuming process is exhaustive and exhausting. During our studio visit, Heilbron jokes that she feels like a 21st century laborer, clicking and dragging, clicking and dragging, the back-rounding work of the computer operator. It occurs to me that clicking has become the 21st century assembly line. I think of all the clicks it takes to train large language models, for example. All the people from West Virginia to West Africa, so-called “humans in the loop,” clicking and circling pedestrians, clicking and labeling faces, clicking and correcting the model. Educators to the machines, and like other educators, poorly paid. The physical, embodied labor needed to train LLMs is massively significant, yet completely invisible.
When I stand in front of Heilbron’s paintings, I likewise cannot see her exhaustive labor. Like an artisanal craft, or like ChatGPT, the smoothness of the finished object belies the intensity of the labor required to create it. We talk about what would change if she were to give her body a rest. To let the vector forms remain as-is, without correction. It might be interesting, but it might also be catastrophic. The hundreds of thousands of clicks and drags it takes her to shape the vector files riddle the digital image with marks of her embodied, physical intuition. To reduce these interventions would be to cede just a little more territory to the symbolic systems that threaten to override our physical, embodied subjectivities.
- Allison Myers