Association of Academic Museums and Galleries

Julie Heffernan’s recent paintings explore imaginative scenarios and alternative habitats as her personal response to the threat of environmental disasters.

With waters rising all over the globe, Heffernan imagines worlds in trees or life on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree branches, and road signs act as guides for this wayward journey. Construction cones interrupt the landscape, signaling places to stop and enter interior worlds, to reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, failure, and redemption. Heffernan reveals worlds within worlds, where her characters tend these alternative environments and safeguard remaining bounties we cannot live without. Her attention to detail—rendering in miniature the Palmyra Temple destroyed by ISIS or the names of embarkation points for Syrian refugees—is a way to remember calamitous events of the past years and mark the plights of victims of current unrest. For Heffernan, this unrest is exacerbated by diminishing water resources and drought due to changing weather patterns and planetary excess. Intricately wrought, Heffernan’s paintings evoke the fantastical allegory of Hieronymus Bosch and the sublime of Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.

With these paintings, Heffernan spells out the dilemma of climate change, but also begins the conversation about how we might adapt to vastly different climatic conditions. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue with plates of works included in the exhibition and others selected for their environmental message as well as texts by Julie Heffernan and exhibition curator Courtney Taylor.