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“I utilize painting and collage in a unique blend as a means of composing visual poems on the topics of time and memory. I assemble childhood objects, geographic maps, and photographs of an imagined “elsewhere” into contemplative images. Through them, I try to grasp the fleeting quality of our recollections and their rapid changes under the pressure of time and displacement. I situate the dimensions of time and memory in the context of the globalized world which is our contemporary reality.“
Vera Heller became an artist as a result of her migratory experience, first from Romania to Israel, and later from Israel to Canada. She started translating her perceptions of an ever changing world into images, first through large format drawings and then through painting and collage. After having studied in social work, she completed a BFA at Concordia University, Montreal, in 1987. A few years later she acquired a deeper understanding of the psychological foundations of fine arts (MA in Art Therapy, Concordia University, 1994). More recently, she received a Ph.D. from Lesley University (Cambridge, MA, 2007); her research project allowed her to experiment with relational art through her work with immigrant women on the topic of “Exile, Identity and Creation”.
Because of her multidisciplinary background, she views art as an interactive and democratic discipline, at once intimate and social, spontaneous and reflexive.
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“I believe that all creative work draws its roots from the unconscious and our childhood experiences. I try to capture their subsisting traces through concrete forms situated somewhere at the border between abstract and figurative. I hope that my work could somehow stimulate the viewers’ imagination and open up the flow of their own memories”.
Active in the arts since 1985, Vera Heller has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Switzerland, the United States and Cuba. She also traveled a lot, taking photographs that she is using today for her collages and paintings. She was the recipient of several grants for both her artistic work (Canada Council for the Arts, and Quebec Council for the Arts) and for her multidisciplinary project with immigrant women (FCAR Scholarship).
Today, Vera continues her artistic practice in her Montreal studio. Faithful to her social concerns, she communicates her creative passion through teaching at the university in fine arts and art therapy departments, and offers creative workshops and individual sessions in art therapy and psychotherapy.
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