(Table optional, + $1,000)
Catharine Clark Gallery closes its 2026 program with two solo exhibitions: Stacey Steers: The Stars Watch from Long Ago, featuring a new handmade animated film alongside video sculptures, collages, and photographs in the North Gallery; and Julie Heffernan: Nature Morte, presenting new oil paintings in the South Gallery. Both exhibitions are on view from November 14, 2026, through January 2, 2027. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, November 14, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., with artist talks at 3:00 p.m.
Working in distinct mediums—experimental animation for Steers and feminist history painting for Heffernan—both artists share a rigorous commitment to craft and a deep investment in cultural commentary filtered through female subjectivity. Each draws on a baroque, gothic sensibility that bridges art history and cinema, pairing visual abundance with a pervasive sense of unease. In their latest bodies of work, both Steers and Heffernan turn toward imagery of fire and upheaval to examine physical and psychological landscapes under threat.
Seven years in the making, Steers’s handmade animation The Stars Watch from Long Ago is constructed from thousands of intricate paper collages that merge early silent cinema with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings of dark landscapes, botanical illustrations, and entomological studies. Immersed in a gothic atmosphere recalling both Edward Gorey and Francisco Goya, the film recasts silent-era actors Lillian Gish and Janet Gaynor within seemingly haunted architecture alongside Spanish actor Ana Torrent, seen in archival images from her iconic childhood performances in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and Cría Cuervos (1976). Collaborating with editor and former student John Romano, Steers layered green-screen paper sequences and rephotographed hand-tinted frames to conjure spectral "phantom presences," accompanied by sound design by Udit Duseja. The film takes its title from the opening line of W. S. Merwin’s poem "Rain Light"—"All day the stars watch from long ago"—which is woven into the work’s structure with permission from the poet’s estate.
"I always begin a film by discovering a landscape that serves as an anchor," Steers writes. Drawn to outer space as an embodiment of what philosopher Hannah Arendt described as life-mooring wonder, she struggled to ground the vastness of the cosmos until she thought of The Wizard of Oz: "It occurred to me that the little house spinning through the sky could become a spaceship for my central character, Lillian Gish." As the project evolved, the constant threat of wildfires in Colorado increasingly informed the film’s meditations on memory and longing. Blending experimental montage with narrative interludes, the work follows a "serpentine structure, circling in on itself like a swirl within a cocoon," where darkness "enfolds like a warm blanket rather than obscuring" and heroines meet loss and the uncanny with psychological complexity, intimacy, and astute self-awareness.
Stacey Steers is internationally recognized for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Appropriating imagery from early cinematic sources, she constructs original, lyrical narratives that have screened globally at the Sundance, Telluride, Locarno, and Rotterdam film festivals, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, and the National Gallery of Art. Since 2011, Steers has expanded her practice into immersive installations that pair invented, three-dimensional sculptural elements with film loops. Her solo exhibitions include presentations at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, George Eastman Museum, Denver Art Museum, MCA Denver, Cinémathèque québécoise, and the University of Colorado Art Museum. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Steers has received major fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and the American Film Institute. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2014.
