Hudson Hatfield

Instagram: @hudsonbupson

Website: https://vimeo.com/user37495776

Bio: Hudson Hatfield (Hud) is a multimedia artist working in video, sculpture, performance, and installation from Colorado. Hatfield received a BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2014. He is a current MFA candidate for Studio Art at Stanford University. Described in the past as “a chapel for gay Halloween” and “Pop Art brewed in the Rockies”, the visual style in Hatfield's work combines themes of spirituality and gay sexual identity in relationship to landscape, geography, and pop culture with a significant dose of slap- stick wit and Olympian bravado.

Statement: Being from Colorado, the myth of the American West is something that has always held a significant amount of weight in my fantasies. Not only as a backdrop for freedom, reinvention, and rugged beauty, but also (and especially as a gay man) as a place of violence, erasure, and loneliness. The friction between these two states…danger and desire…is the frontier from which my art practice grows. I draw specifically from the experiences I had growing up and the many manual labor jobs I’ve worked in the past. In turning on a camera and recording myself in cowboy drag, or wearing my old uniform from when I was a construction worker; I can re-imagine a version of history that gives wide-open-space for my gayness. In doing so, the myth of the American West is not the place that tried to erase me, but the stage on which I reimagine myself in full color. Through video, sculpture, and installation, I can collapse the mythic and the personal, the historical and the intimate. I can stage a cowboy fantasy that’s both real and parody, sacred and silly. I can turn a gas station into a liminal altar, the landscaping job into choreography, and my sense of humor into a weapon.