Julie Heffernan’s oil paintings imagine habitats and situations formed in response to environmental collapse. “When the Water Rises: Recent Paintings by Julie Heffernan,” a new exhibition coming to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, offers these recent pieces. It runs Sept. 22 through Dec. 30 at the venue.
“With rising waters, she imagines worlds in trees or on rafts in which undulating mattresses, tree boughs, and road signs guide the journey,” the museum says. “Construction cones interrupt the landscape signaling places to stop, enter tiny interior worlds, and reflect on the human condition—its feckless activity, violence, failure, and redemption. Heffernan tends these alternative environments to safeguard bounties we cannot live without. In other moments, she names and points fingers to those people and activities implicated in recent calamities of both the physical and socio-political environment.”
See more of Heffernan’s recent work below.
American-born Japanese artist 
Spanish artist Ivana Flores crafts pop-surrealist oil paintings with both a childlike sense of whimsy and ominous undertones. At grand sizes, the works carry an absorbing quality that pulls you into her worlds. Her work has been described as “reality, dream, everyday life and imagination merge at a turning point of boundless consciousness of self-image and world.”