The Brooklyn Rail

In his 2016 book Dark Ecology, theorist Timothy Morton posits models for thinking and conscious coexistence. Digesting Enlightenment and modernist obsessions with the nature of the individual, where the struggle of the self is to define its boundaries and transcend its background, Morton attempts to give us language for the non-dual experience of being both separate and embedded at the same time. According to Morton, we ride a twisted loop of experience that embodies both self and other in one contiguous system of being.

The current tripartite exhibition of recent works by Hovey Brock, Daniella Dooling, and Valerie Hegarty at Catskill Art Space engages in Morton’s style of paradoxical thinking and making. Though shown individually in three adjoining galleries, each artist’s work engages with what it feels like to be a human animal in a lifeworld that struggles to support our collective and systemic behaviors while also desperately wanting to change. These works ask, what is nature if we are also nature? Can we tear up our cultural predecessors while still loving them? How should we handle our complicated relationships with our Mother (Earth)?

Hovey Brock makes paintings using many colors of acrylic that he crushes through plastic mesh one layer at a time. In his screens, Brock embeds words pertaining to the manifestations of climate change in the Catskill ecosystem where he lives: “A Golden Spike for the Anthropocene,” “Fisher Cat,” “Extinction.” Each word or phrase also titles the painting (all dated between (2021–2023). He employs the same concept as a silkscreen print, but on a beefier scale of mesh and thicker layers of paint. His hand-drawn words form resistance on the screens, the letters going from impressionistic to runic after many layers of paint are applied.

The resulting images are a hybrid of Monet’s “Water Lilies” and Ed Ruscha’s mystical-pop word art—optical and mercurial—sometimes appearing three-dimensional or low-relief, sometimes like Color Field paintings, and sometimes as hand-hewn billboards, titles, or short poems. These are messages that we read with our bodies, not just our eyes. The textural experience of the works evokes the expanded awareness of walking in the woods where the colors, patterns, and complexity of the ecosystem are everywhere and within us.

Like Brock’s billboards for the senses, Daniella Dooling’s use of taxidermic canaries (2020–21) immediately cues us into the warning narrative of the canary in the coal mine. Dooling encases the birds in clear yellow and green-blue resin crystals which are clamped into clinical metal armatures, like the last fragments of Earth’s glacial ice on view at an alien museum of the future. The little birds face their audience, floating in their glass-like capsules, sometimes accompanied by a stray bubble—perhaps their last breath.

Alongside the frozen canaries is a collection of found and donated birds’ nests that Dooling calls “FireNests,” (2023) blackened with charcoal dust and embellished with cobwebbed tendrils. She names each nest after a recent wildfire that destroyed human and animal habitats. These shamanic portals, like the canary bodies in resin, impart the power and intelligence of the animal body, whether in the construction of its home or in being a sensitive barometer of toxicity. The artist’s gestures of displaying and altering these objects create a shared narrative of what it is to be human and animal—sensing, making, dissolving, and rebuilding.

Valerie Hegarty’s Overseas (Fireplace with Harpoons) (2006) is a full-sized, buttercream yellow Federal-style fireplace and mantlepiece constructed out of Foamcore, paper, glue, and gel medium. A simulation of an arctic landscape graces the overmantel, pierced by three full-sized, whaling harpoons, their ropes coiling to the floor. The mantle itself is chipped and degraded and a sculpted seagull sits above the fireplace pecking at the debris, its shit running down the face of the construction.

Hegarty’s other works on view are smaller hybrid painting-sculptures depicting warped and shredded baroque paintings being destroyed by sculpted sparrows. Hegarty’s lifelike birds pluck butterflies, flowers, and parchments from the paintings while skulls, bouquets, and fruit baskets are stretched and shredded in baroque curves and coils—a Disney tableaux gone wrong.

An inquiry into many layers of Western culture’s construction of nature, and therefore, itself belies the kitsch of Hegarty’s works. Synthesizing art historical references—harpoons piercing the arctic landscape suggest the violence of Manifest Destiny that underwrote the Hudson River School painters’ depictions of the American frontier; or naturalistic birds that insinuate Zeuxis’s hyper-realistic grapes—the artist imagines a world where her bird sculptures tear Western culture apart, and use the materials to build their own.

Collectively, these works aren’t about ecological crisis so much as they are about waking up to rote storylines about the world around us that no longer serve humanity or the more-than-human world. They are conscious of the perils of fetishizing and therefore separating ourselves from nature, whether in landscape paintings, linguistic veils, or resin ice cubes. Brock, Dooling, and Hegarty create new metaphors through which we might experience ourselves as biological, cultural, and coexisting beings.