Valerie Hegarty’s Seascape, takes its inspiration from an exhibition curated by Roger Stein at the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled Seascape and the American Imagination. Presented in 1975 Stein’s show focused on how American painters sought to constrain the sea into a refined, chartable form and how these depictions defined early American identity as one striving for order in nature and society. Hegarty’s exhibition is a re- imagining of the sea as a transformative force that is unleashed. Informed by the current turbulent state of our country while also excavating from America’s past Hegarty turns the gallery into a dramatic place of change. Muck, flotsam, sludge and snow, merge with cultural artifacts, forming prophetic dioramas that are a cross between historical re-creation and an anthropological display.

At one end of the room, a federalist fireplace decorated with a painting of an iceberg sits stabbed with harpoons. Gauged and oozing mud, the fireplace is reminiscent of a dying whale struck by a mad captain. One harpoon has struck the center of the painting causing the sea to be released. In its wake, a spectacle of decay is constructed out of what remains. Sculptures and furniture atop crumbling white pedestals appear more like fossils in melting icebergs. Paintings turn to driftwood and waterlines demarcate sinking and disappearance. The iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware appears to have been almost fully submerged—its skeletal frame hung up on ropes as if dredged from the bottom of the sea like a sunken ship. With only the top two feet of the painting intact, the image once glorifying the ideals of the revolution is reduced to the tip of the American flag aimed against a stormy sky.

Hegarty suggests the sea to be a path of destruction and chaos that can be traced from early colonialism to the most recent effects of globalization. Seascape portrays a pivotal moment in our narrative – one that is violent and full of pathos yet buoyed by the hope that comes with change.