Scott Hazard: Giving Photography Dimension - His Way
Brooke Martin, Guest Services Coordinator at Green Hill Center shares about artist, Scott Hazard, who show work in the 2012 Winter Show (December 2nd - January 15th)
In appreciating art, we are often drawn to works which remind us of fond memories. One of these works for me is Arthur Dove’s Fog Horns of 1929. This reminds me of family vacations at the beach watching shipping freighters sail past blowing their horns. The visual aspect of this oil painting amazes me because he has painted sound. While visually assessing Fog Horns, one can hear the sharp warning of the horns in the foreground, and the low rumble of the one in the background, on a foggy gray morning.
Above: Arthur Dove, Fog Horns, 1929. Oil on canvas. Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. Photo courtesy of Colorado Springs Fine Art Center.
When I first saw the combination of sculpture and photography in the work of Scott Hazard, I was immediately reminded of Fog Horns. Hazard’s sculptural photography shares Dove’s vision of taking the visual beyond the obvious and into another cognitive realm. Where Dove achieved this by painting sound, Hazard achieves this by building volume and movement through subtracting material from the work. What a wonderful concept since this effect is normally achieved by building up layer upon layer on the surface of the work. His beautiful execution of this concept can be seen in his contemporary sculptural photograph Introjection: Exhaust. He builds the illusion of billows of smoke by arranging the voids in each layer in a mirror image of what the eye would expect. By assembling his work in this way, he draws the viewer directly to this sculptural portion of his photograph and, literally, right in so the viewer and the work become one.
Below:Scott Hazard, Introjection: Exhaust, Contemporary. Sculpture and photo. Photo courtesy of Scott Hazard web site.
