hovey brock
daniella dooling
valerie hegarty

Catskill Art Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work from Hovey Brock, Daniella Dooling and Valerie Hegarty. The three artists examine the destruction of environmental change, offering a foreboding warning to audiences. Amidst the devastation, the artists create a platform for dialogue between us to reduce that toll. From those shared experiences can come community, and ways of responding collectively to the climate crisis.

Hovey Brock's Crazy River is a call for awareness of the environmental degradation the artist has witnessed in Frost Valley and the West Branch of the Neversink River in Ulster County, NY. Crazy River is about the loss, anger, fear, and disorientation Brock grapples with in the wake of climate catastrophes. His installation of paintings on panels and "flags" made of plastic mesh and acrylic paint draped on wooden stands include phrases related to the climate crisis. Titles are taken in part from the obscured text on the paintings: What Do We Mean by Adaptation?, Invasive Species, and The Woods Are Stressed. The work is created by repeatedly scraping layers of acrylic paint over the painted words and the mesh; the process mirrors the artist's obsessive internal dialogue and frequent conversations with his peers over the topic of the climate crisis. The florid colors reflect the growing heat and turbulence in the environment, and the indecipherable words are reminiscent of the wake of invasive species and environmental ruin.

Daniella Dooling encases each bird in The Canary Project in resin casts of natural crystal formations or found rocks. A transparent facet reveals the embalmed bird, positioned upright and looking forward, a frozen gesture of isolation. The artificial fossilization of a canary inside a synthetic geological object held with medical hardware presents contradictory realities. The term "climate canary" originates in the phrase "canary in a coal mine." These canaries are messengers, harbingers that a particular catastrophic event is near. The artist does not condone birds being bred in captivity. She uses these birds to honor their lives and reveal the problematic relationship between human beings and global animal extinction. The Canary Project is joined by Dooling's newest body of work, FireNests, a détournement of abandoned, stolen, and gifted bird nests. The bird nests are made from natural and human detritus, representing survival dynamics, an incompatible compatibility. Dooling's elegant constructions, blackened with graphite, present a specter of past wildfires that have devastated the natural world and us.

Valerie Hegarty makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore memory, place, and history issues. Hegarty replicates paintings and antiques from early American art history and damages them with devices associated with their historical significance. Hegarty explores materiality, incorporating canvas, wood, Foam core, papier-mâché, epoxy, and ceramics. The exhibition is centered around a large-scale installation,

Overseas: Fireplace with Harpoons, which features a federal-style fireplace modeled after one in the period rooms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting atop the mantle is of an iceberg by the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. The vignette is punctuated with destruction, harpoons piercing the scene, an allegory for the paintbrushes of landscape painters' colonialist views of Manifest Destiny. The artist made the installation in 2006, offering a macropolitical view of the environmental crisis through the lens of colonialism.

About the Artists

Hovey Brock is an artist, writer, and retired visual arts and art history professor who lives and works in Claryville, NY. He bases his current Crazy River paintings, writings, and installations on autobiography and research to bring awareness to the unfolding climate crisis. That focus has led him to collaborate with other artists from the US and abroad who address similar issues, providing forums to present their ideas to a broader public. He has shown his earlier abstract paintings and watercolors across the US and Europe.

Daniella Dooling is chair of the Studio Art Program at Bard College and has taught there since 2003. Dooling received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and MFA from Yale University. The artist has had solo exhibitions at The Esther Massry Gallery, Albany, NY; Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, New York, NY; Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY; and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY. Her work has also been shown in numerous group exhibition venues, including Bienvenu Steinberg & Partner, New York, NY; Magenta Plains, New York, NY; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY; Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; Re Institute, Millerton, NY; PAN/Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Italy; American Academy of Arts & Letters; Chelsea Art Museum; Kerry Schuss Gallery; and Exit Art, all in New York.

Valerie Hegarty is a New York artist who shares her time between Queens and Livingston Manor, NY. Hegarty's solo exhibitions include Malin Gallery, Nicelle Beauchene, NY; Marlborough Gallery Chelsea; Locust Projects, Miami; Museum 52, London; The MCA in Chicago; and Guild & Greyshkul, NY, among others. She's been commissioned for a public sculpture on the High Line, NY, and a show of site-specific installations at The Brooklyn Museum. Selected group exhibitions in New York include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, D'Amelio Terras Gallery, Derek Eller, White Columns, and MoMA PS1. Hegarty has been awarded grants through the Colene Brown Art Prize, The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and Campari NY. Residencies include LMCC, Marie Walsh Sharpe, PS 122, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Smack Mellon. Hegarty was the first Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Artist-in-Residence at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, from 2014-15. Hegarty is also an emerging writer; her short story "Cats vs. Cancer" was published 2019 in The New England Review and won a PEN Dau 2020 debut short story prize. Hegarty received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from San Francisco's Academy of Art College, and a BA from Middlebury College, VT.