Hamlett Dobbins & Dana Haugaard
An Old Desire takes its name from the Toi Derricotte poem I Give in to an Old Desire. Both Hamlett Dobbins and Dana Haugaard explore the fallibility of memory, profound experiences, and a love of how art can be used to find connections between the two.
Installation photography: Mike Jensen
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
A native of Tennessee, Hamlett Dobbins spent most of his life in Memphis. He received his BFA from the University of Memphis and his MFA from the University of Iowa. Dobbins has taught at University of Mississippi, Memphis College of Art, University of Iowa, University of Memphis and at Rhodes College. He ran an alternative exhibition space called Material and worked as a curator at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts as well as Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. In 2000 he received a fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. He has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and ArtsMemphis. He has shown his work throughout the region and nationally. In 2013 he was awarded the Rome Prize and spent eleven months as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He now teaches Foundation Studies at the University of Memphis, in Tennessee where he lives with his family.
As an artist working with sound and sensation, Dana Haugaard 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. Haugaard 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. Haugaard has been a resident in the Atlanta Contemporary’s Studio Artist Program and is a Hambidge Fellow. He has recently been shown at the Atlanta Contemporary, Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, the Macon Museum of Arts and Science, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan and won the Forward Art Foundation’s 2021 Edge Award. Haugaard received his MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches Visual Art at Emory University as part of the Department of Art History.