DYLAN HAUSTHOR

About the Exhibition

A few years ago, Dylan Hausthor’s friend lit another friend’s barn on fire. She set the blaze out of spite, simultaneously incited by gossip and provoking gossip. After a few minutes of watching the fire creep up old barn wood she–who was 7 months pregnant–felt her water break, going into labor six weeks early. She ran across the street to the property-owner’s house demanding a ride to the hospital as the proof of her arson was smoking right behind her.

In Past The Pond, Setting Fires, Dylan Hausthor manipulates landscapes that are simultaneously autobiographical, documentary, and fictional: a weaving of myth and symbol in order to examine the chaos of storytelling. Sun-bleached beer cans, waterlogged ferns, and moonlit deer paths seem to be traces left by these stories–field recordings of instability told by an even more precarious narrator.

The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. Small-town gossip, elementary humanity, relationships to the land, and spectacle inspire the images in Past The Pond, Setting Fires, as he tells stories filled with tangents and nuances–echos of the gossip that he hopes that he hopes to both reflect and provoke.

About the Artist 

Dylan Hausthor is an artist based on a small island off the coast of Maine. His work is an act of hybridity–an effort to render field recordings into myth. Interested in small-town gossip and the fragility of journalistic truth, he looks for stories that are found at the end of dirt roads and in the tops of fir trees. He subscribes to emotional cohesiveness in his work and relies on vignettes, tangents, and tropes of conceptual art in his storytelling.

Hausthor received his BFA with Honors from Maine College of Art and his work has been showcased nationally and internationally by the Aperture Foundation, Ain’t-Bad, PHMuseum, Humble Arts, Nava Print Studio, Gomma, Yogurt Magazine, Void, and LensCulture. He founded Wilt Press in the spring of 2015 and currently works as a cinematographer, bookmaker, photographer, and founding editor of Wilt Magazine from an island in Maine. He is a current artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation.