Frank Heath's "The Hollow Coin" explores roles of authority in public space and the intersection of personal and historical narratives. The video combines documentary footage of New York City's rapidly disappearing network of payphones with audio of a covertly recorded telephone exchange between an actor and an unknowing bystander. In the surreptitiously captured conversation an attempted "information leak" is infused with an absurd story and a historical anecdote. The work's title refers to a Soviet spy who was apprehended in 1953 after mistakenly paying his newspaper delivery boy with a hollow coin that contained a microfilm of an encrypted message. Throughout the video a parallel sequence of events reveals that images from the video itself have been stored on an SD card concealed within a hollow coin and inserted into the payphone from which the call was made.

The Hollow Coin

"A Prime Condition" (2017) contrasts the supposedly secure underground storage of film reels in a salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas, with the obsolescence of DVDs.

A Prime Condition

"Path of Totality" documents the events leading up to the August 21st 2017 total solar eclipse in St. Joseph, MO (one of the prime locations within the path of the shadow as well as the hometown of the artist). Featuring a colorful array of eclipse-chasers, middle-Americans, and commercial opportunists who descended upon the small town in anticipation for a moment of impending darkness, the work captures the peculiar mixture of anxiety, amusement, and reflection summoned by the cosmic event.

Path of Totality

"There is Nothing Underneath the West Virginia Wing" (2018) revolves around Project Greek Island bunker, a vast and elaborate underground bomb shelter that was designed to house members of Congress in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Now declassified and open for public tours, the bunker was covertly maintained for 30 years in a state of readiness beneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Heath's video focuses on the eerie spaces of the vacant shelter and its remarkable blast doors which were engineered by the Mosler Vault Company whose bank vaults famously survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima.