When the Water Rises: Paintings by Julie Heffernan

Julie Heffernan’s recent paintings create alternative habitats in response to environmental disaster and planetary excess. With rising waters, she imagines worlds in trees or on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree boughs, and road signs guide the journey. Construction cones interrupt the landscape signaling places to stop, enter tiny interior worlds, and reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, failure, and redemption. 

Heffernan tends these alternative environments safeguarding bounties we cannot live without. In other moments, she names names and points fingers to those people and activities implicated in recent calamities of both the physical and socio-political environment. Intricately wrought, Heffernan’s rendering evokes the fantastical allegory of Bosch and the sublime of Cole and Bierstadt.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website