How Hugh Hayden transforms everyday objects into surreal sculptures

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Artist Hugh Hayden takes everyday objects, from school desks to basketball hoops to cookware, and transforms them into something surreal.

Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston visits the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for a look at how Hayden’s work challenges our perceptions of the American dream.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: Nestled on a field of white plushness, this home, quaint with dormer and windowpanes, could read as the fruits of the American dream realized.

Hugh Hayden, Artist: It’s also like a row of bushes of hedges and this idea of the collection of wood or sticks as a bird’s nest, a bird’s home.

Jared Bowen: That’s the take of artist Hugh Hayden, who is a connoisseur of contradictions. He knows his installation titled Hedges will have myriad interpretations, that these branches thrusting forward in a prickly joust can also read as a barrier to the American dream, preventing access to this home and the others mirrored in Hayden’s infinite neighborhood.

Hugh Hayden: It’s like a fantasy, the American dream being like a myth or a fantasy sometimes of the thing that’s hard to obtain or achieve or difficult to inhabit.

But it is possible to also find your way in it because also the branches are also being protective.

Jared Bowen: Hayden, who is receiving a major mid-career survey at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum outside Boston, dwells in dichotomy, in the dual nature of frying pans as melting pots, a finely crafted baby’s crib with teeth, and in this ladder titled Higher Education, with its teetering shears, it grows more menacing the higher one climbs. Or does it?

Hugh Hayden: Some of them are open, some of them are closed, but scissors or pruners or hedgers are sharp and could be a knife, per se, but there’s a notion of cultivation in education, this idea that education, the higher you go, is supposed to be helping you and it’s cultivating you and molding you to this model citizen.

Sarah Montross, Chief Curator, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum: I think he’s a force of nature.

Jared Bowen: Sarah Montross is co-curator of the show and chief curator of the nearby deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, featuring Hayden’s outdoor sculpture Huff and a Puff, one of many installations presented by the artist at parks and museums around the country.

It offers a warped take on Henry David Thoreau’s famed one-room cabin at nearby Walden Pond.

Sarah Montross: He is a very precise, dedicated maker, often working late into the hours himself, still kind of perfecting his own work, and that to me is the sign of a great artist.

Jared Bowen: Hayden is a trained architect, but left the practice after 10 years to become a full-time artist.

Gannit Ankori, the Rose’s director and co-curator of the show, says Hayden’s background in design makes him the perfect disrupter of the ordinary.

Gannit Ankori, Chief Curator, Rose Art Museum: There’s enough that’s familiar that draws you in. Yes, this is a desk, this is a school desk, this is a chair, this is a coat, this is a house, but then it’s also strange, so uncanny, unheimlich, as Freud would say.

Jared Bowen: Hayden keeps his materials familiar too and works primarily in wood, because virtually everyone has a connection to trees.

Hugh Hayden: If I’m able to change the — what you think a piece of wood or a tree can be, the thing that’s been around you subliminally your whole life, it’s a way in of maybe changing your perspective on some of the more social or cultural, more complex issues my work is kind of attempting to explore.

Jared Bowen: Like these football helmets, enmeshed, as he’s titled it, in The Kiss.

Hugh Hayden: The football, and it’s hypermasculine, which is this sort of can be homoerotic sport, but the interior of these wooden helmets that are contrasting colors, oak and walnut, are filled with these sort of thorny spikes, instead of padding. It could instantly go into concussions and the dangers of high-impact sports.

Jared Bowen: Much of Hayden’s work is autobiographical. The artist says, as a tall Black kid growing up in Texas, he was pressured to play football, despite his zero interest.

But it also gave rise to his ongoing exploration of what it means to fit in.

You’re dressed in camouflage.

Hugh Hayden: Yes.

Jared Bowen: We see camouflage in the show. In what way is this a reoccurring theme for you?

Hugh Hayden: One of the aspects of the American dream I’m exploring is trying to inhabit a difficult space that’s desirable, but also risky and challenging. I see camouflage as this sort of metaphor for blending into a natural landscape as vis-a-vis a social landscape.

Jared Bowen: Which may be Hugh Hayden’s deepest layer, the irony of blending in while also calling glaring attention to the world.

Sarah Montross: You can see how accomplished and how prolific and how diverse the means through which he’s creating sculpture can be. So that, to me, sets him up to become one of the leading generational voices of our time.

Jared Bowen: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Waltham, Massachusetts.