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York College Arts Gallery

Opened in 1989, the Gallery presents several professional exhibitions each year, ranging from solo and thematic group exhibitions to student shows at the close of each semester.

York College Art Gallery is pleased to present

Land Ballads

Barry Hazard, February 8th to March 22th, 2024

York College Arts Gallery is excited to present Land Ballads, a selection of Barry Hazard’s stunning and atmospheric sculptural landscapes. This ongoing series balances the tensions between the natural and the man-made world, reveling in its beauty and its recuperative and spiritual power while bearing witness to the damage we inflict on the world around us.

Hazard uses extremes of scale in formally inventive ways. Landscapes urban and rural spill out of gilded frames. Far-away views and intimate close-ups are compressed within each work, the viewer readily toggling between the two with a minimal change of gaze or position.

Awe of nature’s granduer is ever present, even when depicting the grimy or graphic results of disasters natural and man-made. Hazard finds beauty in the uncomfortable collision of the two. He’s absorbed the mythology of early American landscape art but looks to balance his willingness to depict nature’s beauty with complex issues on climate, land use and other contemporary political issues.

Hazard describes his concerns and process:

I make sculpted landscape paintings that project from the wall, like open dioramas. The subjects are derived from landscape archetypes of beauty, such as mountains, forests, deserts, sunsets, and bodies of water.
I recognize the common and collective love for these subjects, as spaces for reflecting, contemplation, and surrendering to something larger and more timeless than us. I also see conflicts, and our ecological footprint in these landscapes, whether perceived or actual. The conflict might imply environmental, political, cultural, or historical issues. Sometimes it is a specific problem like a melting glacier, while other times it is an unspecified inference that affects my perception of the space.
The process of creating my pictures is much about the mitigation of these potentially contaminated and conflicted subjects, while trying to reimagine beauty.
The miniature series are a result of the Covid 19 experience. The “Minis” are a simple way to rapidly engage in an artistic process, with an ultra-manageable scale. The subject matter of the tiny work addresses the same content of my larger work, while reflecting the need for immediacy, intimacy and a greater economy of space and time.

Artist Biography

Barry Hazard was born in Massachusetts and earned his BFA at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1989. He earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008. In addition to pursuing his art, Hazard has a long history of mentoring youth in the construction trades for YouthBuild, while also working as a licensed construction supervisor in the Boston area.

Hazard’s sculpture-paintings and two-dimensional pictures using a heavy relief. His work incorporates landscape themes and narratives focusing on familiar subjects of beauty and our relationship with nature. Recent images consist of mountain tops, oceans, rivers, deserts, glaciers and forests. The work embraces inferences of environmental conflicts associated with a contemporary landscape. The landscapes are derived and composed from multiple photographs pieced together to make a unique semi-fictional space.

Hazard’s work has been exhibited regularly in group and solo shows throughout New York and New England as well as nationally, including Hesse Flatow (NYC), BravinLee (NYC), Good Naked (Brooklyn), Sweet Lorraine Gallery (Brooklyn), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), HallSpace Gallery (Boston), Holy Cross College (Worcester, MA), Exit Art (NYC), Jack the Pelican (Brooklyn) and Like the Spice Gallery (Brooklyn) and Peripheral Space (LA). His work has been reviewed in the Provincetown Arts Magazine, Art New England, Brooklyn Rail, and the Boston Globe. His newest work was also featured in New American Paintings, #146.

Hazard lives and works in Brooklyn.

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