Paintings
Crumpled Clipper Ship (detail)
Canvas, wire mesh, Styrofoam, Foamcore, paper, glue, acrylics, epoxy clay
68” (h) x 57” (w) x 24” (d)
2019
Valerie Hegarty recontextualizes traditional American history painting to reveal more complex stories. The imagery of the clipper ship, a 19th-century sailing vessel designed for speed, represents the concept of Manifest Destiny, which American settlers moving westward believed justified the expansion of the nation as divinely ordained. As the artist explains, “The rendering of the image and crumpling of both the painting and ornate frame, point to repressed histories of clipper ships and colonialism… The wavy undulations of the crumpled form also make the image of the clipper ship appear to be underwater with its resultant distortions as if the viewer is regarding a sunken history.”