Scott Hazard
Raleigh, NC
ARTIST STATEMENT
The origins of the English word garden refers to a sense of enclosure; the oldest use of the word indicates the fending off of the ‘wild’ to cultivate a more or less safe haven. Scott Hazard’s text based mixed-media works explore how we collectively engage, understand, inhabit and exploit the land. Delving into recent and distant histories of human interaction with our environment, as well as geology, hydrology and plant ecology, the landscape becomes something that can be read. What we might understand to be wilderness becomes less reflective of nature than the constant flow of information, language, images and symbols that habitually surrounds us. Through his work Hazard extracts and projects narratives from/onto constructed cosmic topographies to craft glimpses of fabricated and redefined notions of wilderness in the enclosed. His works feature numerous layers of paper, punctuated with geometric and organic masses of hand-stamped text, which are carefully torn or cut, spaced apart and aligned to define intimate portal-like voids and micro-gardens. In effect, the mixed media compositions he makes involve drawing in three-dimensional space – lines from the edges of torn paper overlaid with the hand-stamped text creates a sensation of movement and reading in space. The viewer has the opportunity to look ‘at’ and ‘through’ each composition simultaneously.
BIO
Scott Hazard is a visual artist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. His works are a meditation on land and the cultural lenses through which we perceive and experience our environment. He has exhibited his work at venues including CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh; Mixed Greens, New York, NY; CONTEXT, Miami, FL; Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA; Flanders Gallery, Raleigh, NC; Adah Rose Gallery, Kensington, MD; Davidson College, Davidson, NC; Roanoke College, Salem, VA; Goucher College, Towson, MD; and Atlantic Center for the Arts, Atlantic Beach, FL. His work has been featured in a number of magazines and online publications, including The Washington Post, Glamcult, WILD Magazine, Oxford American, Monster Children, BOOOOOOOM, Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, and Colossal. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and a Professional Development Grant from the United Arts Council. Born in San Diego, California, Hazard received his landscape architecture education at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and earned his MFA at the University of Florida.