For His Newest Present, Artist Hugh Hayden Reveals Extra About Himself

Within the late Eighties, in a suburb of Dallas, an estimated 5,000 group members took half in creating Kidsville, an all-wood, medieval-inspired extravagant playground that claimed to be the most important volunteer-built playground on the planet, aided by youngsters elevating funds by way of penny drives and native retailers supplying tools and wooden.

Chatting with a group’s resourcefulness, the story of Kidsville, accomplished throughout two weeks in April 1989, serves as a becoming introduction to Hugh Hayden’s nostalgic-laden solo exhibition, “Homecoming,” on the Nasher Sculpture Heart in Dallas, town the place the artist grew up. Hayden’s life-size reconstruction of Kidsville, Brush (all works 2024), options its play areas—staircases, clatter bridge, slide—lined in boar hair bristles, rendering this treasured construction unusable and unexpectedly scratchy. However the work additionally flirts with sentimentality: boar bristle brushes are identified for his or her pure energy to detangle and depart your hair with a shiny end, an apt metaphor for nostalgia’s energy to render formative experiences right into a silky-smooth haze.

Outlined by Hayden’s return to Texas, the works in “Homecoming” are laced with a kernel of vulnerability that hides beneath their elusive, lustrous surfaces, ruminating on the challenges of rising up Black and queer within the American South. Take Mixing In, through which a soccer uniform lined in bark hangs from a collection of lockers. In a piece highschool awkwardness and anxieties in widespread areas, the heartfelt work embodies hiding one’s queerness for worry of social rejection throughout the protected standing of Massive Man on Campus. Equally, the set up Reducing Board options an industrial lunchroom desk, its wooden floor crawling with a forest of purple graphite tipped appendages, sandwiched between two mirror partitions akin to a dance studio. The sparse set up performs into the juxtaposition of a number of highschool stressors: the cafeteria and the locker room. Your each transfer, together with the place you resolve to take a seat, is being noticed, refracted infinitely by way of the mirrors.

Elsewhere, Hayden divides the exhibition house through false partitions and passageways, suggesting home areas the place skeletons and refashioned housewares trace on the ghosts that hang-out us. Get Collectively, a group of skillets and inventory pots with African masks solid into and protruding from their polished surfaces, remembers slavery’s direct ties to postbellum home labor, whereas Laure, a contemporary tackle Manet’s Olympia (1863) reveals a skeleton of the mannequin’s Black servant, Laure, on a white sofa, the place she is given an opportunity to relaxation. The specters of historical past are much more pronounced in Made in Heaven, of two intertwined white oak skeletons with discovered instruments—a brush, mop, shovel, or spade—for ft are confined to a closet. In utilizing skeletons, Hayden makes the studying of those figures deliberately ambiguous: they may very well be identical intercourse, blended race, or any variety of combos.

Different works within the exhibition recall earlier items by Hayden however with a twist befitting his return to residence. Pecanocchio, a brand new iteration of Hayden’s childhood puppet sculptures, is common from {a photograph} of Hayden as a toddler, matching his harmless gaze and cherry purple romper, whereas Power Area (2024) arranges three of Hayden’s drugs—blue HIV prevention capsules, white allergy capsules, and purple hair-loss-prevention tablets—into the form of a flag, this time a fluttering Lone Star ensign for a deadpan tackle delight.

Hayden’s candor, nevertheless, can really feel fleeting as his work is firmly planted in the course of meanings, the place two opposing views usually concurrently exist. It’s as much as viewers to in the end resolve what they take from the exhibition. Supper,a eating room desk lined in sprouting eraser-topped twigs, for instance, could be in regards to the irritating ubiquitousness of the nuclear household in suburban America or, for many who discover that aspect of Americana outdoors their grasp, it captures the eager for a extra normative expertise. The pint-sized church of Fortunately Ever After could be in regards to the pervasiveness of faith within the South or it may well replicate a full-throated embrace of the establishment’s transformative nature and its highly effective impact on an adolescent attempting to grasp the world.

These already enchanted by Hayden’s surrealist suburbia will discover a tender presentation that reveals the artist reflecting on private historical past as a solution to confide in one thing greater, whereas these new to his work will possible glean the rationale behind his rising reputation in a survey that captures of the breadth of his potent aesthetics. “Homecoming” (on view by way of January 5) speaks to the self-reflexive energy and distinctive motivations that coincide with returning to 1’s outdated stomping grounds—and the trustworthy, shocking revelations that the voyage can encourage.