Reverse Archeology
A site-specific installation by Valerie Hegarty
Andrew W. Mellon Arts and the Common Good Artist-in-Residence
April 22, 2015 to present
Brothers College
Drew University, Madison, NJ
"For her project at Drew University, Hegarty is creating a false excavation site within the former chapel of Brothers College: a Brobdingnagian rabbit hole in the middle of a wall that is part time machine, ossuary, and scrying mirror. It is here that the spirits of the university will commingle with the spirits of the artist’s past. The striped purple and white wallpaper created from childhood memories of her parents’ bedroom are conflated with an interior/exterior view of Mead Hall in the wrong direction, where a singed-out portrait of Daniel Drew—devout Methodist, unrepentant capitalist, self-serving fabulist—hangs lopsidedly in the wreckage. It will be here that Hegarty’s theatrical backdrop becomes the star performer, blurring the boundaries between past, present, and future—and through all these layers of artifice we’ll find the truth, always shifting, always elusive."
—Alex Jovanovich, March 2015 (excerpt from brochure essay)