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; “Two for Today” at Shin Haus; “Is That Supposed To Be The Moon?” at Evening Hours; and “How Quick a Dream Becomes a Habit” at GOODNEWS in Brooklyn. Group exhibitions include “Otherwise” at Half Gallery; “Noumena” at ChaShaMa; “Notes from Across Time” and “Would You Like to See the Dessert Menu” at Skylight Gardens; “Apple in the Dark” at Harkawik; “Westside Exposure” at Westbeth Gallery; and “Ventriloquist” at Evening Hours. 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.

Statement

I am a painter who invites mystery. My paintings are driven by a quest to make material the images that live inside the walls. Whether the walls are the backs of my eyelids, or the walls are layers of leftover paint from my palette that I apply to canvas, images emerge like portals to other timelines. I approach my painting process in two ways: one is starting with a fragment of an image, usually one that visits me as I’m falling asleep late at night and that I yearn to make visible. The other approach is equally undetermined and begins with adding paint and other materials directly to my canvas until the image begins to form, a bit like a Rorschach test. These two approaches allow me to more easily collaborate with my unconscious, which I believe is intuiting more than I am aware of about the world I live in. I tend to think of my paintings as canaries in a mine. 

My interest in mystery rests on my belief that the world shapes itself. The boundary between creatures and our environs, between what is real and what is imagined, is entirely porous. To indicate this in my work, I often separate shadows and reflections from their origins to point towards the aspects of reality that are dismissed as “unreal”, yet without them the rest of the world would be without a “real” physical form. The only things without reflections are vampires. The only things without shadows are immaterial, unaffected by the sun and therefore ungrounded in time. The real and the unreal exist together in ever-shifting entanglements, which is what makes life convincing.