Dana Hargrove’s Enclosure

Enclosure, a solo exhibition by Dana Hargrove

Bridgette Mayer Gallery

On view from January 30 to March 23, 2024

Artist Reception & Happy Hour: Friday, February 2nd, 5:00 – 7:30pm

In the Vault: Ada Trillo

For our first exhibition of 2024, Bridgette Mayer Gallery is thrilled to announce Enclosure, a solo exhibition by Dana Hargrove featuring all new paintings, works on paper, and two installations. In addition, the Vault will feature photographs by Queer Mexican American artist Ada Trillo from her series, Old El Paso. These exhibitions are included in (re)FOCUS, a Philadelphia citywide festival recognizing the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts (1974) and celebrating how women-identified and BIPOC artists have moved from the periphery to the center of the art world. Enclosure and Old El Paso will be on view from Tuesday, January 30 to Saturday, March 23 at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. On Friday, February 2nd, there will be an artist reception & happy hour from 5:00 – 7:30pm at the gallery.

Fresh off her two recent artist residences in Iceland and North Carolina, Enclosure will be Hargrove’s fifth exhibition with Bridgette Mayer Gallery. The title is derived from the 18th and 19th century Enclosure Movement in England, which forcibly privatized public and communal British land. The work in Enclosure explores our world’s changing landscape in the face of capitalism, industrialization, and environmental threats. Hargrove’s colorful and abstracted landscape paintings blur the distinction between natural and constructed environments, creating a portal to lead viewers from the built world to the untamed wilderness. As a Scottish American artist and frequent world traveler, Hargrove is well-attuned to the underlying narratives found in natural and industrialized landscapes globally and over time. She states:

As a female artist working in an historically male-dominated society, I think about how our developed landscape is a product of short-term ambition and not of generational nurture. I find it astounding how far removed we have come from living naturally on this earth, and how we have arrived at a moment where nature has become increasingly simulated. Even the landscapes on my doorstep are ultra-processed, sometimes in strange ways that add back a sprinkle of nature, often striking me with a wry humor. My recent work comments on the ever-widening gulf between nature and culture and the narrowing green belt that protects nature from our sprawl.

Read the full press release here.

Artist Statement

The word enclosure has many open-ended meanings, yet the general concept points to a lack of open ends, to the closing up of space. Historically, enclosure has been applied to land. The ‘Enclosure of the Commons’ allowed wealthy landowners to partition common resources traditionally managed by local communities. The privatization of communal land persists globally and perpetuates a pattern of disenfranchisement affecting all but a privileged few. Colonial takeovers, land grabs, forced migrations, and habitat loss all occur as access to nature and the ‘common treasury’ becomes narrowed and less equitable.

While lamenting my own lack of access to nature in Central Florida—a stark contrast to my upbringing rambling freely around the countryside of Scotland (one of only fifteen countries with some form of a Right to Roam Act)—I am reminded that in the United States, property rights are protected and typically take precedence over rights of way. Freedom to access and enjoy nature is often limited to public spaces such as parks and preserves, many of which are under threat of being rezoned.

My work develops while thinking about the in-between, mediated spaces—fertile grounds where I like to explore and farm my ideas. Managed rural boundaries are often planned as a ‘green belt,’ an area of bucolic countryside that exists as both a buffer and a portal between the built world and the untamed wilderness that may no longer even exist. My Treeline series in particular acts as a forest/city hybrid, intersecting along the green belt and commenting on pressing issues such as deforestation and possible revitalization, as colors shift and grow from concrete and plastic urban hues toward lush greens and canopy light. By contrasting the relationship between a region’s nature and topography—such as tracing trees from the imperiled Split Oak Forest in Florida alongside human-induced vertical facades—I point to the ecological decline and environmental disruption that occur as our natural landscapes are developed into civilized urban forms.

Read the full artist statement here.