Fallen Bierstadt is Valerie Hegarty’s rendition of Albert Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, which hangs in the North Carolina Museum of Art.

These works are...different. While Bierstadt’s painting is majestic and exhibits the beauty of the wild west and Americans' (well, not Native Americans’ obviously) ‘Manifest Destiny’ to stake their claim on that land. Hegarty’s is a little more like some trash you would find at Bridal Veil Falls after peak tourist season. Hegarty’s piece is so severely weathered that parts of the canvas look like they fell off onto the floor. This isn’t like when jeans are cooler with holes in them, so people purposely distress them instead of just waiting for normal wear and tear to make them fashionable, though. Hegarty wasn’t trying to chic up her work by making it look distressed. It’s more a comment on how absurd it is that colonists thought they were entitled to the entire United States and also how quickly landscape painting went out of fashion. Hegarty explains, “I was interested in using the Bierstadt painting because early American landscape painting was important in shaping American identity so I’m interested in this notion at the time of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ this idea that as Americans we were destined to expand across the United States to the west coast.”

She was also interested in Bierstadt’s complete and utter fall out of favor with the American public as soon as landscape painting was out. Poor Albert got the boot into oblivion right around the time that his studio burned down. He died soon thereafter and pretty much everyone forgot about him until the 1940s, when he was restored to the throne of idealistic portraiture. Hegarty’s attention also boosted his popularity in an art world full of formaldehyde-submerged cows and fur-covered tea cups.

Hegarty knows that strange mediums go farther in this crazy art world. Granted she doesn’t go for anything as outlandish as meteor dust, but she does use foam core, which is like a cardboard/styrofoam combo. This is what gives her paintings their gross and distorted look. Because if you’re going to be a painter in contemporary art, you have to do something sorta gross and distorted or you’ll be forgotten as quickly as poor Albert.