Valerie Hegarty

Informed by the current turbulent state of our country while also excavating from America’s past, Valerie Hegarty often turns the gallery into a dramatic place of change. Her large-scale installation work incorporates a process she calls “reverse archeology” in which layers of painted paper are adhered to the walls and floors of the gallery and then scraped back to create a material memory of a space. She also constructs canvases and sculptures that replicate paintings and antiques from early American art history from canvas, foam, paint and papier-mâché only to falsify their ruination by devices associated with their historical significance.