Dana Haugaard statement

images | bio | statement | reviews

Artist Statement

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 remembering. They 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 the installations I create are no different. But can comfort and terror coexist here, and what can they generate simultaneously?

I am exploring the fluctuating relationships between our self-awareness, place, and time, and how 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.