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Catharine Clark Gallery

August 30 - September 28, 2008

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248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
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Broken Homes
Catharine Clark Gallery announces the upcoming solo exhibitions of new paintings by Julie Heffernan, titled Broken Homes, and The Starling Drawings, a video installation by Adam Chapman in the Video Room. An opening reception for the artists is Saturday, 6 September, 1–3pm. The exhibition dates are 30 August – 27 September, 2008. A new limited-run catalogue titled Julie Heffernan: Broken Homes has been published by Catharine Clark Gallery and will be available for sale. Julie Heffernan’s new body of paintings, titled Broken Homes, offers a dramatic departure from the trademark figurative works that make up her most recognizable oeuvre. Bisected architectural structures that present a number of concurrent visual narratives dominate her new compositions and expand upon the artist’s long-established talent for grandeur and provocation. Heffernan pulls from a visual language that encompasses an extensive range of historical references, from Biblical stories and Greek architecture to the recognizable forms of present-day urban sprawl and post-9/11 imagery. The paintings are a cacophony of visual information and serve as illustrations of the myriad thoughts, ideas, concerns, and sexualized daydreams that filter through, not only the artist’s mind, but any mind on any given day. The exhibition title Broken Homes references the ubiquitous term relative to a home-life environment that diverges from the path of expected “norms” and the outmoded notions exemplified in popular black-and-white 1950s-era television shows such as Leave it to Beaver. With the onset of the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 70s these ideas were displaced in favor of the full color, "warts-and-all" family entertainment provided by shows such as The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch—weekly dramas that told the story of colorful and creative single-parent and conjoined families. In essence, happily dysfunctional alternatives to the expected norm that provided layers of meaning and understanding where once there was only one, flat, colorless story onscreen at any given time. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Julie Heffernan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She possesses a fine arts master’s degree from Yale University and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation. In 2006, her work was the subject of a touring solo exhibition, titled Everything that Rises, organized by the University Art Museum at University of Albany, New York. This is her second solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery.