Spalding Nix Fine Art proudly presents Forging ahead, a presentation of four solo shows by Heather Bird Harris, Andrew Herzog, Robert Hightower and Jamie Bourgeois.

‘Forging’ is defined as the act of making or shaping a metal object with heat; the act of creating a relationship or new conditions; or to produce a copy or imitation of something for the purpose of deception. ‘Forging ahead’ is to make quick progress, moving boldly against resistance.

Marking the first exhibition of 2025, the artists in this show examine our history and our impacts on the planet and one another, creating work that informs how we might move forward to shape our future. Heather Bird Harris’s series of new paintings “love as large as grief demands” transforms mapped industrial scars in Georgia and Louisiana into regenerative landscapes made with site-specific materials. Andrew Herzog’s Day(‘)s end is a series of rock pigment and mixed media paintings that meditate on the residues left by human activity—material, cultural and temporal—and the ways in which they inform the landscapes of the present and future.

Robert Hightower’s Icons of the toybox is a series of oil and enamel paintings that reflect on the mass production and marketing of non-essential products starting in the 1950s, inaugurating our transition from basic capitalism to ‘American Consumerism.’ Jamie Bourgeois’s Petrochemical plants is a series of earth pigment and assemblage paintings that explore the pervasive and insidious nature of plastics and petrochemicals as they disrupt and accumulate in ecosystems and in our bodies.