PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2021


DylaN Hausthor (Portland, Me)

In Dylan Hausthor's work, we are submerged in a parallel universe of otherness between what we see and what we imagine. His images place us halfway of something about to happen or that just happened, and his generous black-and-white language pushes photography’s register to its extreme boundaries; in an effort to show us both, its potentials and its pretense - all made with delicacy.


–Milagros de la Torre (Artist, Member of the 2021 Jury).


Image © Dylan Hausthor. Courtesy of the artist.

[… ] I’m interested in photography and bookmaking as mediums of hybridity—weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines between investigative journalism, performance,
acts of obsession, and self-conscious manipulation. I’m interested in pushing past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real. [ …]
— Dylan Hausthor

Dylan Hausthor is an artist based in New England. Their work is an act of hybridity–an effort to render field recordings into myth. Interested in small-town gossip and the fragility of journalistic truth, they look for stories that are found at the end of dirt roads and in the tops of fir trees. They subscribe to emotional cohesiveness in their work and rely on vignettes, tangents, and tropes of conceptual art in their storytelling. Hausthor received their BFA from Maine College of Art and is a current MFA candidate at Yale University. Their work has been showcased nationally and internationally by the Aperture Foundation, British Journal of Photography, Photo District News, PHMuseum, Vice, Gomma, World Press Photo, LensCulture, Vogue, and the permanent collection at MoMA’s library. They are a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves fellowship for visual artists, runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, a recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard grant and residency, and the winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer’s Fund. They founded the art publication imprint Wilt Press in the spring of 2015, released their first trade edition monograph with Void Photo in 2019 with their collaborator Paul Guilmoth and currently works as a farmer.

http://www.dylanhausthor.com/