Artist Talk

Valerie Hegarty’s work explores the idea of reverse archaeology that expose the memory and idea Hegarty wants to display. She originally study painting but after graduating she started to experiment with other materials and art styles such as sculpting and paper mache. In many of the installation works consist of being made of cardboard, paper, and paint. One of her works that was installed in the Brooklyn museum, where she changed a colonial style room display into a animal invested room. Hegarty explores the room's setup expands her ideas to create a room that will work with her style. In the colonial style room there was influence of historical events being expressed through her work. For example, in “Native American Rug with Marsh grass” there was Native American rug that appeared to be decaying and separating that symbolize Native culture being destroyed and losing their land to the European. Also in “Native American Chief with Branches” there was a portrait of a chief that Hegarty altered to follow the Native belief in transformation and shape shifting. These style of work, where it shows physical destruction of the room to symbolize events in history and how the destroyed a culture in a visual way.

When I saw her work I was amazed on the detail and design of the work she did but more on how it was only detailed in the position you were to see. Most of her installation work plays with the viewer eyes to believe her work is realistic, but is actually made up with craft items like cardboard and paper mache. Just recently I had to make a sculpture with paper mache and that was a struggle because of the material used, so when I saw Hegarty’s large room installation of the bathroom I was shocked on how she made the bathroom sink and toilet smooth to appear realistic. As continued on, she showed portrait painting that were manipulated to be seen as decaying, burned, water damaged, and chopped. This was impressive because she used her painting skills and applied her them into another form of art that she stated “had little experience with,” so seeing how she improved and merge these skills was interesting.