Chris Hagen
Chris Hagen’s work is shaped by doubleness: two surface outcomes, two countries and multiple ways of reading the same image. Living between Australia and the United States, Hagen is attentive to the space between places, perspectives and systems of meaning. His works do not resolve these differences, but hold them in suspension. Raised in northern Wisconsin by a biologist and a journalist, Hagen grew up between observation and storytelling—the impulse to record what is present and the need to interpret it. Images and information are layered across opposing or interconnected surfaces, allowing each work to be encountered from more than one position. What appears stable from one side may shift, fragment or become uncertain from another. Weather recurs as both subject and metaphor. Atmospheric changes and unstable conditions become ways of considering the broader environmental and political climates through which we move. Hagen’s works occupy the space between knowing and not knowing, asking viewers to reconsider what they see and how understanding is continually formed and revised.
Artworks
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