NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER

Hugh Hayden: Homecoming

September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025

Best known for his work in the traditions of wood carving and carpentry, Dallas-born, New York-based artist Hugh Hayden builds sculptures and installations that explore the idea of the “American Dream.” Reconstructing familiar things like Adirondack chairs, household furniture, or basketball hoops using wood and other materials, Hayden transforms these signifiers of leisure, family, and athletics into surreal and somewhat sinister objects. Many of his vernacular sculptures are covered in hand-carved thorns or unwieldy branches that imply pain or difficulty to those who try to inhabit them—a metaphor for the fraught pursuit of achievement and status. In other works, Hayden leaves readymade objects intact, only to cover them in tree bark, ultimately concealing recognizable status symbols. Likening bark to both armor and camouflage, Hayden uses it to show how clothing can be similarly deployed as a shield against racial prejudice or as a way of blending in or passing.

For his exhibit at the Nasher, Hayden mined the memories of his upbringing in Dallas to create new sculptures that revel in themes of nostalgia, childhood, education, and religion. While these motifs reoccur throughout much of Hayden’s work, sculptures like Brush — a boar-hair-covered play- ground at the center of the gallery— and the bark-covered football uniform in the installation titled Blending In nearby, have personal resonance for the artist. They refer to Hayden’s own memories of the beloved “Kidsville” playground in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville and the years he played football at Jesuit High School. Despite the specificity of these works and others in the exhibition, they are likewise universally recognizable symbols of youth in the collective memory of Hayden’s generation. The style of playground equipment that Brush embodies—made entirely of wood and evocative of treehouses or Medieval forts—was common in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, before it was replaced by the industrially fabricated metal and plastic equipment that characterizes most playgrounds today. The pencil-covered kitchen table and chairs titled Supper recalls a dining set that was ubiquitous in suburban kitchens in the 1990s, while the Ikea loveseat, here serving as a pedestal for the display of Hayden’s reclining tool skeleton Laure, could be found in most college dorm rooms in the early 2000s. In each instance, he alters these commonplace objects in ways that complicate and subvert their utility and meaning. Through his uncanny sculptures, Hayden shows us the strangeness in the ordinary and articulates his experience of growing up Black in the American South.

Homecoming is a culmination of Hayden’s sculptural vocabulary that he has developed over the past 15 years. Featuring all-new works created specifically for this presentation, it is also the artist’s first solo exhibition in his hometown.

Samara Golden:
if earth is the brain then where is the body

September 28, 2024 – January 12, 2025

For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been creating installations that deploy architecture and mirrors to create disquieting and disorienting environments, often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, that have in the past spoken to experiences of violence and its aftermath, disparities of class, or illness and recovery. Her often mind-bogglingly complex installations can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. Golden populates them with handmade domestic forms and textures using such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality.

For her exhibition at the Nasher, Golden will create a new installation conceived for the Lower Level Gallery—a room fronted by windows, approached from a descending staircase. Visitors entering the gallery will encounter a seemingly infinite and fantastic space evoking cascading pools, ranging from the fetid to the paradisical—a place where memories, emotions, and possibilities converge. Within an environment constructed from converging mirrors, smaller-scale handmade elements populate realms that evoke sensations associated with water and waves, whether the oceanic reaches of the subconscious, the possibility of floating, suspended, as if in utero, or the enclosing depths that conjure the terror of drowning.

Golden has created works for sites as varied as a room with a view of the Hudson River for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a two-story, brick interior at MoMA PS1, an expansive gallery with a stained-glass window for Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, or a warehouse large enough to the accommodate the towering array that formed her 2022 installation Guts, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In a time when mirrored surfaces often speak to opportunities for selfies and the closed loop of social media, Golden turns her mirrored environments into mise-en-abyme settings for uneasy enchantment and critical reflection.

Nasher Sculpture Center

2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
214.242.5100

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