DANA HART-STONE

Growing up in the Northeast corner of Montana provided Dana Hart-Stone the opportunity to wander the rugged countryside littered with abandoned homesteads. In these remote places, he found evidence of early pioneers who struggled to survive in the country referred to, for good reason, as the Badlands. Not knowing the complete stories of early life on the frontier energized his curiosity and wonderment that these fragments of narratives presented. Empowered by curiosity and wonderment, being the lifelong energies that have fueled Hart-Stone’s creativity, he began collecting vintage, vernacular, American photographs forty years after his initial childhood discoveries.

 

Fascinated by the unknown stories found in the vernacular snapshots, he began employing that same electricity in his current body of work that reveals an unromantic view of American life that actually was. Utilizing formal structures of filmic image repeats and kaleidoscopic, Busby Berkeley tondos of images digitally stitched together, Hart-Stone creates works that not only celebrate the developing West, but also chronicle evidence, simmering under the initial entry point in which each piece beckons, of race, gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic positioning, and class.

 

After attending, Montana State University and University of Montana, he completed his undergraduate degree in Art at San Francisco State University. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums throughout the United States including the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC and is held in private, corporate, and museum collections