File:Valerie Hegarty Overseas (Fireplace) 2006.jpg

Installation by Valerie Hegarty, Seascape: Overseas (Fireplace with Harpoons) (foamcore, paper, paint, glue and gel medium, approx. 10' x 8' x 8', 2006). The image illustrates a key body of work in Valerie Hegarty's career in the 2000s when she produced irreverent, often critical, trompe l’oeil works that replicate canonical paintings, domestic furnishings, and architectural spaces from American history undergoing various processes of transformation. In the pictured work, she created simulations of shipwrecked and decimated painting (a reworking of the Frederic Edwin Church landscape The Icebergs) and Colonial furniture, sculptural debris and rot, and plants emerging from fissures in walls and floors. This work was publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions, discussed in major art journals and daily press publications and commissioned by major art institutions.

Artist Valerie Hegarty. Copyright held by the artist.

Valerie Hegarty

Installation view

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key later body of work in Valerie Hegarty's career in the 2000s: her irreverent painting-sculptures and installations that replicated renowned still-lifes, landscapes and portraits (e.g., by Albert Bierstadt, Church and Gilbert Stuart) or period furnishings, only to destroy them through detailed simulations of decay and various assaults. Critics suggested that these works "gently ribbed art historical precedents" such as 19th-century expressions of the sublime and challenged both romantic attachments to Americana and the legacy of the nation's "whitewashed history." These works involved careful attention and meticulous processes to render the material effects of destructive forces (rot, overgrown nature, fire, dilapidation), producing surprising juxtapositions: weathered, damaged and aging environments integrated into pristine gallery spaces; violent forces unleashed into opulent period rooms; romantic landscapes come to life with sprouting leaves and branches. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this stage and body of work, which brought Hegarty additional recognition through exhibitions, commissions and coverage by major critics and publications. Hegarty's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Valerie Hegarty, and the work no longer is viewable, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.