Carl E. Hazlewood
Carl E. Hazlewood
Workspace Program Resident 2018
There was a question during my Dieu Donné residency, of how to use my time effectively; how to develop a cohesive body of work while remaining open to the vicissitudes of experimentation and discovery. I’d been working in other media on the theme of ‘Turbulence’… exploring the idea of survival against a background of constant struggle. I thought about the story of 75 Igbo people who, in 1803, survived the trip across the Atlantic as well as a successful slave ship rebellion in the United States, only to commit mass suicide at Dunbar Creek in Glynn County, Georgia. The site of this group drowning is now known as Igbo Landing. I’m not interested in using the specifics or documentary facts of the story—for many of us it has always been a ‘sink or swim’ situation—but the Igbo determination to live or die free on their own terms suggested a form I could use for my project. Together with my excellent and intuitive Dieu Donné Master Collaborator, Tatiana Ginsberg, we worked out the technical processes for my evolving concept. My abstract approach tends to reduce form to a suggestive fluidity, with just a few hard-edged or dissolving shapes—swimmers, divers, floaters, sinkers, etc.—suspended within the pictorial space.
—Carl E. Hazlewood, 2018
Carl E. Hazlewood has created work in a large breadth of media including performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography, and digital. Hazlewood often works abstractly, sourcing every-day materials to integrate within his pieces. During his residency, the artist played with blowouts to shape each cotton and abaca sheet. He then used stencils and pulp paints to create semblances of tear drops, confetti, and abstract shapes which dance across each composition. Pulp paints were thinned in order to create layers of watercolor effects, and flaking pigment fragments were added to break up each composition. On some sheets, while the pulp sheet was still wet, Hazlewood incorporated dividing lines that seemingly scar each painting, created by pressing a straight edge into the pulp and allowing paint to pool at random. Carpet and tape were later added to one piece in this series— both forms of media often used in Hazlewood’s works.
In the Studio
About the Artist
Carl E. Hazlewood (b. Guyana) received a BFA from Pratt University and a MA from Hunter College. As a visual Artist, curator and writer, he co-founded Aljira a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Recent awards and honors include residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France, The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, the NARS Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. A 2017 ‘Tree of Life’ award grantee, his fifty-two feet work, ‘TRAVELER’, (2017) was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Queens. Hazlewood’s work has been shown recently in PRIZM, Volta, and Scope Art Fairs. He has been reviewed by BOMB Magazine, NY Times, and Hyperallergic. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.