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.
Past the Pond, Setting Fires
A few weeks ago my 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 four 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.
Small-town gossip, elementary humanity, relationships to the land, and spectacle inspire the stories in my work. The characters and landscapes in these images are documents of the instability found in storytelling–told by an even more precarious narrator. I hope these images act as gossip in their own right: cross-pollinating and alive.
The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I began making images as an act of hybridity: weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines of editorialism, spectacle, and an examination of the absurd stories found in nature. I’m interested in pushing past questions of validity in evident field recordings and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.
To view more of Dylan Hausthor’s work please visit their website.