"He has spent the last decade or so thinking about the land as a witness to history and politics. Boundaries shift, places are named and renamed, and maps are redrawn. Land is bought, sold, worked, exhausted, and fought over. It remembers everything and the events that unfold at a particular site become part of its permanent record, even if that record is unseen and mute."
"In 2016, Hayes exhibited a series of paintings titled In the Hour Before. These landscapes relied on the aerial and satellite photos he found on Google Earth, drawn from its "street view" function, allowing him to look at images of places that had been witness to mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other catastrophes. Abstracting from this source material, he made landscapes of these often mundane scenes. In each, he sought to create a visual memorial to a place and to the people who died there."
Stephen Hayes increasingly adopts abstraction in landscape paintings and monotypes to treat land as a witness to history and politics. He considers boundaries, toponymy, and maps as records of conflict, commerce, and labor, with land retaining a mute, permanent memory of events. His 2016 In the Hour Before series abstracted aerial and satellite imagery from Google Earth to memorialize sites of mass violence. For a recent cycle he worked toward acknowledging the enormity of what occurred in Gaza, turning to abstraction to confront inexpressible horror and sorrow. Abstraction allows escape from literal specificity, enabling layered, nontemporal responses and visual memorialization.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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