Laurence Hegarty  

 

Originally  from London, Laurence  Hegarty has lived in New York for more than four decades. Initially trained as an artist Hegarty's interests have wandered over the years leading him to pursue film studies and psychoanalysis  as partners in the conversation that shapes his studio endeavors.  Hegarty has trained as a psychoanalyst and  he now maintains a private practice in  New York City. He is also a therapist in the counseling service of The Juilliard School.  Though  the two disciplines –studio art and psychoanalysis– are not integrated in  any way,  it is the  overlaps and collisions between them that  shape Hegarty's   art making.  Often staged as parades or processions his installations  employ found objects  jostling for space alongside figures hoisting flags, batteries of rubber cameras, weapons, carriages and sundry domestic objects. Frequently used are photographs and fragments of writing plundered from poems, psychoanalytical texts, European art cinema, and liquor commercials. The general tone is theatrical, the loose organizing principle narrative while the references trade in allusions to popular culture, political turmoil, clinical horror and drunken reverie.

 

Hegarty is also a writer and teacher. For more than two decades he has taught both BFA and MFA classes in studio art and cultural studies at Parsons The New School. 

He is also a contributing editor to the cultural blog Romanov Grave.