Hardscrabble

Dave Hullfish Bailey’s work proposes a practice of exploratory geography that combines sculpture, photography, text, drawings, and other elements. His sculptural assemblages bring together a diverse array of material, from livestock feeder to printer supplies, car bumpers, maps and roofing panels, that come together in a system of linguistic and functional relations.

At REDCAT Bailey presents a selection of works exploring sites in the inland west of the United States, each related to an alternative educational model. These sites include the Purgatoire River drainage, home of Drop City, a short-lived experimental community founded in 1965 in southern Colorado; the volunteer-run library in Slab City, an ad hoc autonomous zone for snowbirds and a small year-round population located on an abandoned military base in Imperial County, CA; and a detour into the Nebraska Sandhills from the zone of totality of the August 21, 2017 eclipse.

Bailey’s practice occupies a space in the seams between the landscape and the symbolic tools by which we think about it. Against political tendencies toward abstraction or instrumentalization, Bailey’s works unfold as a concretized thought process in which, what might be, remains rooted in the complexities of what already is.

Saturday April 21, 4pm, REDCAT Lounge
Join us for a public discussion between writer and independent curator Michael Ned Holte and artist Dave Hullfish Bailey. 

Saturday, April 28, 4pm, Gallery at REDCAT

Closing Event: Walkthrough with the artist