09/04/2020
Something beautiful sprouting at HSFA 🌱Colleen Hargaden: Strategies for Inhabiting a Damaged Planet opens Saturday September 12.
Utilizing the forms and techniques of contemporary “survivalist” culture and the DIY “maker movement,” Colleen Hargaden’s work responds to ongoing developments in technology, as well as the systemic social, ecological, and economic pressures that prompt their creation. Each project involves full participation in the collective knowledge base of one of these developments, be it the tiny house phenomenon, model rocketry, open source 3D modeling, or doomsday prepping. Underlying these subjects is the central question of our ability to create objects which will help sustain or obtain basic human necessities of shelter, land, food, water and medicine. In this way, Hargaden’s sculptures and videos exhibit what theoretician Stephen Wright refers to as “double ontology,” describing something which contains a primary ontology as whatever it is, and a secondary ontology as an artistic proposition of that same thing. In Hargaden’s practice, each project is, or contains within it, work possessing the ontology of sculpture, video, or installation, and simultaneously, that of tool, kit, or learned skill.
