Artist Statement
As we navigate through life, we constantly immerse ourselves in the landscape around us. Through the lens of art, we can explore this environment and strive for a more responsible ecology of place.
As we delve deeper into our understanding of the world, we come to realize that it is an intricate web of relationships. Dualism, the belief in a separation between the self and the environment, is a harmful oversimplification of our ecological experience. When we view the non-human world as mere objects, we remove ourselves from responsibility for our impact on the planet. We must remember that we are not the only subjects in the narrative of Earth. Our landscapes are intricately woven with the stories, trajectories and agencies of human, animal, plant, mineral, idea and thing. We are dependent on this landscape of things, alive and material, which in turn is dependent on us.
It is essential to consider where the individual ends and where the landscapes we inhabit begin. We live here together and I have painted you. My work is a collaboration with landscape to produce effects in myself and others, aesthetically and emotionally re-configuring ways of seeing the world.
Artist Bio
Noel Hefele is a landscape painter based in the Bronx, New York. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MA in Arts and Ecology from Dartington College of Arts in England. He was an Artist in Residence at the Barbuda Archaeological Research Center in 2013 and 2014.
His work is held in private collections internationally. He has exhibited widely throughout his career, with a focus on the ecology and landscape of the Bronx and Hudson Valley. He is a 2021 City Artist Corps grantee and serves as a volunteer coordinator at Van Cortlandt Park.