Dana Hargrove

Dana Hargrove, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee University, Scotland with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honors in Painting. She continued her education in the USA with a Master of Fine Art from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Hargrove is a Professor of Studio Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida where she now resides.

Hargrove concerns herself with ideas that frame our perceptions of the land and our sense of place and space, she employs a range of media from photography, collage, sculpture and installed paintings including large-scale site-specific works.

Represented by the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia. She continues to exhibit her work both internationally and nationally and she has recently exhibited her work at Lightner Museum; Rollins Museum; Start Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery; Orlando Museum of Art; Deiglan, Akureyri, Iceland; Alt_space Gallery, Atlantic Center for the Arts; Cornell Fine Arts Museum; Bridgette Mayer Gallery; and Greatmore Studios, Cape Town.

She has received several honors and awards such as finalist for the 2017 Florida Prize, National Young Painters Competition First Place Award, full artist-in-residence fellowships at The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, Hambidge Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, CentralTrak, and Greatmore Studios artist in residence in Cape Town, South Africa.

Artist Statement
Landscape, and how we manipulate it to fit preconceived ideals or corporatized molds, has become familiar territory for my art practice. Whether I am exploring the urban environment with its homogenized grid of rectangular blocks, or examining how culture frames and re-frames landscape, I remain responsive to how our perceptions of the world and sense of place are shaped by human design.

My spatially illusionistic representations offer synthesized versions of geological outcrops, cairns, or memorial mounds of gathered rock. Organic forms are civilized through linear perspective and a hard-edged painting approach that highlights our ongoing subordination of nature.

Classic western movie sets, with their façade communities propped amid panoramic backdrops of desert and mountain have informed the installation of components within Absentia. Placeless and staged, they act as stand-in monuments to the loss of natural landscape brought on by capitalism and its co-opting of the wild.

Take a look at Hargrove’s CV.