When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings

This exhibition catalogue features recent works by artist Julie Heffernan included in LSU Museum of Art’s exhibition, When the Water Rises. Essays by Curator Courtney Taylor, art writer and critic Eleanor Heartney, and LSU School of Art professor Kelli Scott Kelley as well as a statement by Julie Heffernan accompany the full-color plates in this richly illustrated catalogue.

Julie Heffernan’s recent paintings imagine alternative habitats as creative responses to climate change. With waters rising all over the globe, Heffernan imagines worlds in trees or life on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree branches, and road signs act as guides for the wayward journey. Construction zones interrupt the landscape, signaling places to stop and enter interior worlds, to reflect on the human condition- its feckless activity, violence, and failure. Heffernan reveals worlds within worlds, where her characters repurpose luxury items and safeguard bounties we cannot live without. Figures tending, nurturing, and creating suggest redemption- that we can adapt to a changed environment. With these paintings, Heffernan spells out the dilemma of climate change, but offers a vision of a creative sublime to carry us forward.

Julie Heffernan received her MFA in Painting from Yale and a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is represented by Catharine Clark in San Francisco and P.P.O.W. in New York. Heffernan is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University.