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.
In Nature Morte—French for "still life," or literally "dead nature"—Julie Heffernan subverts the conventions of Renaissance, Baroque, and Dutch painting to confront a world on fire. Throughout her career, where climate activism and feminism continually entangle, her canvases have featured intricate miniature vignettes that unfold as parallel narratives to her main compositions. In previous series, these episodes read like film strips referencing classic neo-gothic cinema—such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and its vision of the female grotesque—while citations from Western art history, including Hudson River School landscapes and portraits of Queen Victoria, blossom from expansive branches or emerge from beneath a central figure’s skirts. Rooted to a precarious terrain, these fecund environments remain structurally unstable, suggesting that the world’s abundance is inextricably tied to its fragility.
Between lush cascades of tulips, poppies, and dahlias in various states of bloom and decay—an impossible fantasy of plenty—Heffernan’s new paintings inset scenes of contemporary catastrophe: wildfires in Los Angeles; explosions and bombings in Iran, Gaza, and Venezuela; a Ukrainian drone strike on the Tuapse oil refinery; burning cars and crumbling buildings; and a tropical island in flames. By scaling memento mori from the individual to the entire planet, her dying and exploding flowers serve not merely as reminders of human mortality, but as urgent warnings that the earth itself is in peril.
Julie Heffernan is an American painter whose work has been described by writer Rebecca Solnit as “a new kind of history painting” and by The New Yorker as “ironic rococo surrealism with a social-satirical twist.” Framing her vividly detailed canvases as subjective “Self-Portraits” of a world gone awry, she reflects on environmental, art historical, feminist, literary, and sociopolitical themes. Heffernan holds a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Since 1999, she has mounted over 50 solo exhibitions internationally, and her work belongs to 25 museum and institutional collections. A National Academician inducted into the National Academy of Design, she has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, and Fulbright-Hays, alongside fellowships at MacDowell and the Camargo Foundation. Author of the graphic memoir Babe in the Wood (2024) and founder of the blog Painters on Paintings, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2005.
