reviews

"Brian Hegarty's exhibition catalogue for Time Minds describes his observation of the environment as a "living-breathing chronicle" of the passing of time and humanity. Loaded with a weighty post-industrial feel, the images are collages of felt, paint, bitumen, paper, canvas and board. Worked primarily in a palette of cold colours - pale to darker blue, verdigris, grey, white and black - the strong reds where they appear are all the more strikingly shocking. If this is Hegarty's view of the 'human condition', it is a cold and uncompromising vision. "Man and nature are inseperable" says Hegarty, but here it seems as if this mutual inseperability has been twisted by hard struggle, each side with annihilation on it's mind.

The time Hegarty has captured seems located in some future space, where the symbosis between man and nature has degenerated to a point where each is hanging by a thread. Here one feels that the earth is striking back, that it is an unequal struggle. After all, however much we destroy sustaining nature, whether that destruction will ultimately result in the end of us, something will always remain. The dark and coldly unforgiving nature of that something is what lingers, brooding about the edges of these works. This is the kind of art Mad Max might make, if he stopped off to get creative on his journey through the post-nuclear-apocalypse Badlands.

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