Heffernan Exhibition "Holding Up" at Stanislaus State Art Gallery
California State University, Stanislaus’, College of the Arts, Department of Art, University Art Gallery is very pleased to present the solo exhibition of Julie Heffernan, “Holding Up,” April 4 through April 29, 2011 with a reception and artist talk Thursday, April 7 at 5:30 p.m.
This exhibition represents Julie Heffernan’s most recent works and is curated by the Founding Dean of the College of the Arts, Daryl J. Moore. Dean Moore describes Heffernan’s recent works as, “… ripe as noted over a decade ago in an Art Forum review, where Ms. Heffernan began to unleash her densely realized fantastical world of her ‘other self’ in portraiture that continues to draw us close seductively as only the ripest of fruits can do. While we stare, suspended and perhaps lost in the exotic world dreamt only by Heffernan, we marvel at her generosity and capacity for picture making, lost perhaps in the gaze of her many personas. Personas slightly distant, a-drip with life’s pain and desires, faces in full bloom that inhabit the duality of the worlds she has created on these most current canvases.”
Heffernan states, “I am a mother. These paintings are both my cries in the wilderness and my attempts to do something… My two sons, like everyone else’s children, will inherit the brunt of their ancestor’s excesses. In the ‘Boy’ paintings I’m imagining a young man in transition, and I as the painter and puppeteer am supplying this young man with some of what he might need as he moves into adult life. These works are my attempt to pass on some of the wisdom I’ve accumulated in a life spent studying and making art, in a fashion reminiscent of Hamlet’s Polonius passing on hoary wisdom to his son and being regarded as a fool. I'm using the space of the canvas to meditate on life changes and how we might move into new chapters of our lives both personally and as a planet… What we imagine we can manifest.”
Heffernan was born in Peoria, Illinois, raised in Northern California and currently lives and works in New York. She is an Associate Professor of Painting at Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey.
Contact:
University Art Gallery
Dean De Cocker, Director
Phone: (209) 667-3186
Email: art_gallery@csustan.edu
Updated: June 26, 2023