Valerie Hegarty

Relocated into the gallery from its original site in Riverside Park, Fresh Start (2020) illustrates a phantasmagorical narrative in which Hegarty imagines that an ornate Dutch Vanitas painting was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the pandemic and then abandoned outdoors. The work poignantly combines elements of destruction and loss in the context of a pandemic with signs of incipient hope and renewal, as embodied by new foliage growing around and directly through the painting and an albino dove holding resurgent flora in its beak.

The lower level of the gallery is devoted to Hegarty’s Covid Diaries series with works inspired by her own journal writings from the period after she relocated to rural upstate New York in the spring of 2020, while Covid was ravaging New York City, to the present. Drawing from her own experiences of trauma during this period, including the loss of dear friends for whom she could not properly mourn and alarming, vaguely apocalyptic scenes from across the nation, Hegarty depicts a domestic environment under assault by outside forces: a deadly, uncontrolled virus; political turmoil and social unrest; a worsening opioid epidemic; climate-related catastrophes and violent manifestations of the nation’s original sin of racism.

The Covid Diaries works are grouped into a series of fevered, hallucinatory vignettes. Two large scale sculptures, Teapot with Clipper Ship (2021) and Faucet with Horsehead (2021), illustrate the intrusion of external cataclysms directly into the home, which yields no safe haven. In Sink with Teapot, Mug and Spoon (2020), the natural environment appears to be exacting a revenge of sorts, with invasive foliage overtaking a household sink. Covid Refrigerator with Flowers (2021) and Covid Mini Fridge (2021) evoke an elegiac tone with references to both loss and futile attempts at preservation. A series of sculptures depicting the destruction of red, white and blue cakes evoke the broader themes of socio-political discord and the fraying of democratic ideals alongside an expression of the artist’s own rage at the exogenous forces that seem to be overtaking her own life. As with much of Hegarty’s work, flowers frequently assume center stage. Tulip sculptures invoke both the notion of Vanitas and a catastrophic period in Dutch history, while Ikebana or kadō arrangements allude to metaphysical conceptions of the relationship between humans, the earth and the heavens.

Framing all of Hegarty’s works is an unease about her own place in the broader historical narrative as an individual who is inadvertently, perhaps inevitably, complicit in the nation’s systems of oppression and inequality, but strives to transcend this position by adopting the outsider perspective of an artist. Many of Hegarty’s works appear to crumple under the weight of historical sins. They frequently drip and blur in acrid colors - redolent of something inherently rotten. In the context of multiple, overlapping cataclysms, Hegarty creates an elegiac space for those who have recently passed and for those we have never properly mourned. Though her gaze is unflinching in her attempt to survey the tragedies and losses of our the current age, Hegarty maintains the courage to offer hints of hope for healing and renewal in her work.