Iceland Series, mixed media on paper, 2017

A Professor of Studio Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, Dana Hargrove concerns herself with ideas that frame our perceptions of the land and our sense of place and space. In her art, she employs a range of media from photography, collage, sculpture and painting installation, including large-scale site-specific works.

Hargrove’s spatially illusionistic representations offer synthesized versions of the natural landscape, where organic forms are tamed and organized in a way that highlights mankind’s ongoing subordination of nature.

About the Iceland Series

For a month I walked the terrain of a small, remote fjord in Northern Iceland. Underfoot, the track changed swiftly from tarmac to gravel, mossy grass to mud, over sharp rocks up to delicate mountain flowers and cushioning heather. Beyond, the icy skyline constantly shifted through a variety of clean blues; horizontal banding etched across the heights of the surrounding mountains. Below, road, fence and path echoed these natural contours. 

 Work in the studio became infused with this topography. My beating of the tracks, with their constant changes, worked its way into the explorative process of my paintings. The outside expanse, often fettered by man’s imprint, instilled a rhythm of mark-making that, despite the freedom of approach, is mindful of the framing principle of order that reverberates through a journey, no matter how far we travel from civilization.
– Dana Hargrove