Author Description

Airline to Heaven, Part I began as an animation installation and suite of works on paper. Annie Heckman created writings in tandem with this exhibition, forming a series of short texts exploring afterlife ideologies, dead pets, and strategies for facing the end of life. These are collected here together with drawings and animation stills from that series. Matthew Dal Santo and Terri L. Russ were both invited to contribute to the book as a sort of salon anthology; rather than writing essays on the work, they created their own primary texts to run parallel to the themes explored in the existing art and texts. The result is a powerful collaboration, serving as a pilot project for the press in establishing dynamic interactions among artists and writers.