Hilary Devaney is a New York-based visual artist who uses painting to interrogate structures of meaning-making. She earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2022. Her works have been presented in galleries, project spaces, and schools in and around New York City. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include “Years of Night” at Kent Place Gallery in Summit, NJ and “Two for Today” at Shin Haus. Recent group exhibitions include “What A Fool Believes” at Subtitled NYC; “Otherwise” at Half Gallery; “Noumena” at ChaShaMa; “Notes from Across Time” and “Would You Like to See the Dessert Menu” at Skylight Gardens; and “Apple in the Dark” at Harkawik. In 2022 Hilary was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. In 2023 she was an artist in residence at Catwalk Institute in Catskill, NY and at Gitler &_____ Camp David in West Shokan, NY. Most recently, she was a resident at Hercules Art Studio Program from 2023-2025.

Statement

My work is concerned with how we interpret and process the information we receive from our senses. With a human desire to narrativize our lives and make meaning out of our environments, where does this start to slip from socially acceptable to paranoid or delusional? There are specific culturally acknowledged coincidences and signs of luck, like horseshoes, four leaf clovers, catching the time at 11:11, but deriving meaning from unauthorized coincidences is pathologized. There’s a fine line between authoritative interpretation and personal resonance. While it’s generally encouraged to look for symbolic meaning in paintings, I am more curious about this compulsion to sniff out the plot rather than the signs and symbols themselves.

These are questions I began to consider recently during a residency in West Shokan, NY when I noticed a number 9 carved into a fallen log. On closer examination I realized it wasn’t carved by a human but chewed by a beetle, the image of the 9 being imposed by my mind in order to make familiar something I had never seen. I’ve been making paintings with portals to other spaces and times in order to capture the fullness of existence, as memories, dreams, pasts, futures, and longings are all embedded in our day-to-day living. After seeing the beetle galleries (as I learned they’re called) I’ve become more interested in making paintings as sites of transit, with the portals being less literal and more vague, with the potential for more personal interpretations from viewers. Signs arrange themselves as messages from someone else, somewhere else, another timeline, possibly the after-life. Signs haunt us, sell us products or ideas, distract or focus us. Are we collaborating with them in the power they hold over us by seeking to understand them?