黑料不打烊

Working in the tradition of wood carving and carpentry, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the 鈥淎merican Dream.鈥� Church pews, a dinner table and chairs, or a football helmet鈥攕ignifiers of faith, family, and athletics鈥攂ecome surreal and somewhat sinister subjects in the hands of Hayden, who frequently carves thorns and branches into surfaces of things that would normally come into contact with the human body, implying potential harm, or at least discomfort, should they be engaged with. 

For his exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Hayden will mine memories from his childhood in Dallas, nodding to homelife, school, and play from youth to adolescence. As a key component of Homecoming, Hayden will create a rendition of a children鈥檚 playground covered in thorns carved from the base material. The artist envisions a version of the playground known as 鈥淜idsville鈥� that was imagined, designed, funded, and built entirely by volunteer residents of the Dallas suburb of Duncanville in 1989. Hayden associates Kidsville with childhood nostalgia for a time when a community came together for the benefit of their children. Constructed entirely of unpainted wood, Hayden鈥檚 primary sculptural material, in a style evocative of children鈥檚 treehouses or Medieval forts, Kidsville represented the kind of playground architecture that has slowly disappeared from parks and schoolyards, to be replaced by industrially fabricated, colorful, metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today.  

Accompanying Hayden鈥檚 interpretation of Kidsville will be a series of new sculptures by the artist, using familiar objects with complex cultural backgrounds to create metaphors for human existence and the somewhat fraught pursuit of achievement and status.