Bio

Mark Hagen (b. 1972 Black Swamp, Virginia) finds inspiration in the breakdown of hierarchies, history, and vision. His practice synthesizes the often contradictory movements of process art, finish fetish, minimalism, craft, modernist architecture, and DIY building. Using various utilitarian materials like cement, steel, and burlap in processes that embrace modularity and geometric repetition, Hagen creates works that are as disorienting as they are ordered. For his “additive” screen sculpture, he cast cement units from consumer packaging, recycled cardboard, and a mold made from the tiles on the facade of the abandoned Rampart police station. Composed of three movable interlocking panels, each the same height as the museum’s temporary walls, the work creates a semitransparent field through which to glimpse the surrounding space and other works in the gallery. In We’ve Seen the Future and We’re Not Going (2012), Hagen made a wall of black mirrors using obsidian (or volcanic glass boulders) cut into a sequence of plates, polished, and mounted on a modular aluminum space frame. Both the plates and the space frame can be rearranged or “unoriented” in what Hagen calls this “space-age meets stone-age” work.