Richard Haden
Above: vessel 2, 2009
Richard Haden was born in Frankfort, Kentucky and began his art education at the University of Kentucky. He apprenticed with Robert Bourdon in Sheridan, Wyoming, then he moved to San Francisco, then the Lower East Side in New York, back to the West Coast, then South Florida and now Miami. His work has been shown around the country; exhibitions include 'New Art South Florida' at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and solo shows at lincart, San Francisco and Allan Stone Gallery in New York. He was recently included in a group exhibition exploring aspects of trompe l'oeil in modern and contemporary sculpture at Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York. One can find him interviewed, writing and written about online at vernissage.tv, wetheat.tv and artlurker.com, among other sites.
Main Breaker, 2010
Statement
WE are conversation, ART is conversation. This conversation engages in history, tradition, craft and leads to a successive relationship of moments based in temporality - to begin a conversation between us again.
Crafted in the tradition of a carved wooden language, my handmade objects are covered with a painted skin-to draw you out of yours. It's not my wish to satisfy a nostalgic desire for the well-made artifact nor do I want to meet the normal expectation that the substance of wood might convey in a carving. It is my aim to engage you not as a passive receiver but as a collaborator while at the same time I maintain control of producing this conversation - a double entendre production.
Heritage is what we are. Gushing up from heritage emerges tradition. Although I work in a traditional manner, tradition is not the meaning of the work. I find meaning by doing. The possibility of new tradition is revealed in the meaning of the past as present, looking forward through reworking and re-articulating the already known aspects of heritage and historicity. It is in time that we speak and it is in temporality that the objects ahead of us are found familiar yet loaded with mattering and meaning.
I choose to invest hours of meticulous craftsmanship in producing banal and everyday objects, in order to focus our attention toward a seemingly nihilistic conversation for the sake of which we are afforded an estranged glance through anti-foundationalist lenses.
We curiously peer into the illusion of nothingness. Yet from inside this existentialist abyss there exists a rather odd optimism or a positive resoluteness if we dare focus on the implications that nothingness reveals. From nothingness comes creation -to climb out of nihilism we craft authentic desire and creative possibilities for further conversation - once again we rework from what we already have.
My work doesn't speak down to you; it is no more than what we already know, yet it is through the everyday that meaning is disclosed. Not in the brute facts of the Hyper-real ontics but in the facticity of an ontology based in being and time. What is before you is a conversation critical of tradition that goes back to a richer heritage of making meaning by doing. It begins in a world of craft and carries on in a world of discourse.