Dana Haugaard

Dana Haugaard

Way Way Back: Gothenburg, NE 1987


January 23, 2020 – March 8, 2020

What lives in the quiet moments of remembering that drift in orbits around the longer narrative of our lives? What grows in the fertile tensions between the attraction and repulsion of memory; what we integrate vs. what we discard. What stays liminal and never stabilizes? What small circles do we weave ourselves into, and is there pleasure in those constraints?

I want to hold a space here for the small moments that may seem mundane, easy to discard, but which carry the weight of all their contexts: all the futility of remembering and all of the necessity of it as well. Memories exist, though, now in light of what we hold presently and in light of what we’re carrying - socially, politically, interpersonally, ecologically. All memory is to some extent invented, and this experience is no different.

Way Way Back: Gothenburg, NE 1987 is a record of me remembering a moment. It is one of my earliest recollections, set alongside a recording made by my great-great grandfather who is remembering the same day and recording himself remembering way, way back to when he was young. The perforations in the enlarged approximation of the tin can, similar to ones I made when I was young, are a transcription of the sky over Nebraska on January 15th, 1987 when the recording was made.

The fluctuating relationships between our self-awareness, place, and time, and how the act of remembering a memory brings to light perceptions that can be both true and false from moment to moment. By distilling and manipulating sensations in a contained environment, I hope to provoke shifts of perception in the viewer that induce self-reflection and a heightened sense of self-awareness, within and without.

Bio

Dana Haugaard

Dana Haugaard received his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a graduate of Emory University. Dana has been a resident in the Atlanta Contemporary’s Studio Artist Program and is a Hambidge Fellow. He has recently been shown at the Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, the Macon Museum of Arts and Science, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids Michigan. As an artist working with sound and sensation, Dana investigates how our self-awareness in any given moment functions in relationship to our presence in space, place, and time. He works with sensation and perception to create environments that provoke a heightened sense of awareness of one’s self. Dana uses and manipulates sound, reflective surfaces, and vibrations to construct experiences that draw attention to and call into question our relationship to our surroundings. These situations play with physical, spatial, and temporal reference points to take what is often a minimal presentation and make it an overwhelming experience. Dana currently teaches Visual Art at Emory University as part of the Department of Art History.

Location

Chute Space gallery map


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