Work > Reverse Archeology

“Play Pen”, The Drawing Center, New York, NY
Wall text: Valerie Hegarty recreates her childhood bedroom using layers of colored paper adhered to the walls. During the course of the exhibition, her installation will be stripped from the walls, a process analogous to memory and loss. Hegarty describes the installation as “An archaeology of my past, the recreation impulse taps into the power of make-believe where I create a space of a remembered place, which I can re-enter and excavate in order to discover something about the present. In this way, I become my personal history’s creator, archaeologist, and historian – a concept that can extend out to our dynamic relationship to the past.”