Stacey Steers: The Stars Watch from Long Ago
North Gallery and Media Room
 
Julie Heffernan: Nature Morte
South Gallery
 
on view November 14, 2026 – January 2, 2027
Opening reception: Saturday, November 14 from 2 – 4pm; remarks at 3pm
Read the full exhibition press release
 
SAN FRANCISCO — 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.
 
Seven years in the making, Steers’s handmade animation The Stars Watch from Long Ago is constructed from thousands of intricate paper collages that merge early silent cinema with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings of dark landscapes, botanical illustrations, and entomological studies. Immersed in a gothic atmosphere recalling both Edward Gorey and Francisco Goya, the film recasts silent-era actors Lillian Gish and Janet Gaynor within seemingly haunted architecture alongside Spanish actor Ana Torrent, seen in archival images from her iconic childhood performances in The Spirit of the Beehive(1973) and Cría Cuervos (1976). Collaborating with editor and former student John Romano, Steers layered green-screen paper sequences and rephotographed hand-tinted frames to conjure spectral "phantom presences," accompanied by sound design by Udit Duseja. The film takes its title from the opening line of W. S. Merwin’s poem "Rain Light"—"All day the stars watch from long ago"—which is woven into the work’s structure with permission from the poet’s estate.

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. 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.