The grammar of photography and the invisible design of observed life meet in a sequence of exquisitely crafted microcosms.Canadian artist Hudson Hayden's photographic practice crafts a delicately articulated language that plucks and punctures photographic categories. From the romance of stillness and space to shaky articulations of capitalist experience, Notwithstanding articulates itself as a laconic series of speech acts, steeped in off- kilter humour, askew optimism, and a love for the visual medium.This series of precisely-crafted images began in 2016, with Hayden's move to Europe. Photographing instinctively, Hayden touches the well-worn grooves of contemporary image culture: from the intersection of photography with semiotics, the inferred distortion of narrative through sequencing photographs together, and how everyday objects can become icons simply by being photographed. Hayden's visual lexicon is akin to one of design; forms and their thingness are collapsed in on the photographic plane, becoming shapes that dance, as much a game of memory and fun as a loftier space of visual poetry.Hayden's title, Notwithstanding, also speaks to the indeterminate and the inarticulable within his photographs. Images that often describe something simple – a dog, a ball, a boat on a lake, or an orange in a bowl – can feel curiously other, despite themselves, or in spite of their clear referents. Hayden quotes photographic genres with a laconic wit: from the Ghirrian coolness of early postmodern colour photography, to the sanitised language of advertising and commercial image-making, and through compositions that harmonise in both their immediate accessibility and their inherent unknowability.
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