VALERIE HEGARTY

Valerie Hegarty is a New York City based artist who makes paintings, sculptures and installations that explore issues of memory, place and history. Starting with a personal inspiration, Hegarty seeks out poetic connections between her personal history, art history and current events. Hegarty relishes the materiality of her process, incorporating a range of materials such as canvas, wood, Foamcore, paper-mache, epoxy and ceramics.

Hegarty's canvases and sculptures that replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history are presented as ruined by devices associated with their historical significance. Although representational, Hegarty's works contain surprising juxtapositions and uncanny transformations where materials and meanings are constantly shifting

Ernestine’s first collaboration illuminates Hegarty’s warped early American art history works with fused glass, hand-painted by the artist. See available works here.

The process involved working between Ernestine Studios in Livingston Manor, NY and Hegarty’s studio in Brooklyn. First Hegarty created a warped, framed painting in epoxy clay that Ernestine studios used to slump glass to create the wavy shape of the works. Hegarty painted a series of early American landscapes based on famous paintings in the art historical canon using special enamel for glass. Ernestine studios refired the glass on the mold, causing the paint to fuse with the glass. Hegarty used epoxy clay and gold paint to add some framing details to several of the works. Ernestine Studios created wall mounts and installed the lighting.

The original American landscape paintings the glass works were based on were often praised for their luminosity, even causing early viewers to peek behind the paintings in search of lights. In Hegarty’s work, the heroic masterworks that were used to build a national identity and containing messaging of manifest destiny, are reduced in scale, and irreverently back lit. Idiosyncratic shapes, imperfections and cracking in the glass were retained and reinforced, to allude to distressed canvas. By warping these idealized scenes, her work exposes the instability beneath myths of permanence and progress, echoing a contemporary moment shaped by political polarization, historical reckoning, and environmental crisis. Erosion, rupture, and imbalance become metaphors for a country grappling with climate damage, contested narratives, and the consequences of unchecked power. Hegarty’s landscapes are not nostalgic views of a lost America, but uneasy terrains where history, ecology, and politics collide, insisting that what appears natural or inevitable is, in fact, fragile and made.

See available works here.

www.valeriehegarty.com
@valeriejhegarty