American Berserk

Burning in Water is pleased to present American Berserk, a solo exhibition of new work by the Brooklyn-based artist Valerie Hegarty. Please join us for an opening reception in our NYC gallery space at 317 10th Avenue on October 6 from 6 - 8 pm. American Berserk is Hegarty’s first solo exhibition in New York City since her acclaimed Alternative Histories at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013.

Throughout her career, Valerie Hegarty has explored fundamental themes of American history and particularly the legacy of 19th-century American art, addressing topics such as colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism and environmental degradation in her work. Elaborating upon visual references to the art-historical canon of North America, Hegarty repurposes the ideological tenets of such works into a critical examination of the American legacy.

The title of the current exhibition is borrowed from Philip Roth’s Pulitizer-winning novel American Pastoral, in which Roth defines the inverse of the American pastoral ideal as the “indigenous American Berserk.” The show features a series of recent watercolor paintings and four groups of ceramic sculptures. The suite of watercolors suggests a fevered, hallucinatory vision of America examined through the prism of its visual artistic traditions. Hegarty's anarchic, revisionist take on American history as manifested in the nation's artistic legacy is further embodied in her fantastical ceramic works. The sculptures, which seem imported from a parallel universe, include watermelons that become animated, explode and then decay, sly depictions of George Washington as a series of topiaries, spectral clipper ships erected from bones and an assortment of "fruit face" personae that survey the surreal proceedings.