Dana Hargrove - Artist Statement

In our culture today we have become used to splitting our lives into parts. The constant commuting between loved ones and our career compartmentalizes our lives while we struggle to define our true sense of place. This sense of dislocation is a reoccurring theme within my work; reestablishing myself yet again has allowed my reexamination of this process of disconnection and reconnection.

Analyzing my recent experiences while relocating, I have found that the system of travel is a highly complex and sophisticated abstraction. There is a dichotomy present; on the one hand we have the system, which is larger than the individual. The experience of travel is unified and abstracted by higher powers to better aid our feelings of comfort and safety as we soar through the air or speed along the interstate. We follow rules. We read maps and signs, we have a continuity of design despite the distance. The system presents itself as seamless and controlled.
Then we have an individual's experience of travel - the senses, the action, the accompanying emotion as we leave or reunite with homes and loved ones. We also fear the systems failure or our failure inside the system. We are unpredictable and variable.

My concern within these paintings is - If there is a gap between the system and the individual, with the system larger than the human, does it encourage our sophisticated removal into abstraction and our ease with the representation rather than the reality?

Adopting visual cues from within the different network systems while coexisting them with the expressive nature of painting I ask myself the above questions. The questions become answered while I ponder and paint; Life with a jolt will remind us that the maintenance of control is a façade. Life will always remind us to feel.



"To be Titled" Installation

Materials: Wooden houses and LED lights.

The house form is a cultural icon. We all wish to attain the comfort and warmth of ones own home since "Home is where the heart is". These five houses float above the floor while color glows from within lighting up the ground below. Although these houses look sweet, they also comment on the ties and binds that run our daily lives. Each house creates a metaphor of the human life that is different yet fundamentally the same, and although each house seems to float freely above the ground it is in fact locked in place.

How we construct our lives, our environments, our social personas, and our relationship to the home may lend itself to further investigation and wonder and a even more complex meaning of the term "home sweet home".

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