Shaw Center for the Arts
College of Art & Design
Louisiana State University
Exhibition Gallery
100 Lafayette Street
225-389-7180
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Rachel Hayes:
Patient Persistence
March 7-March 29, 2009

Rushing through our daily lives, the concrete buildings and wire fences barely register; we are accustomed to our environments. What if something wonderful is waiting out there amidst the construction and dust? What if someone can find something new in our forgotten and discarded remnants? Rachel Hayes does just that. She employs readily available media such as fabric to create spectacular experiences of color and motion in an otherwise unappreciated setting. She has successfully intervened and turned narrow hallways, city walkways and grassy hills into vital and vibrant art installations causing the viewer to step back and reassess their familiarity with the environment.

Louisiana State University School of Art invited Hayes to Baton Rouge to create a new installation in its downtown exhibition space, giving the community an opportunity to discover something fresh about the city.

Hayes has steadily garnered accolades and awards over her young career and has gained contemporary art world recognition for her fresh, innovative works. In this exhibition, Hayes works with LSU Sculpture students creating a site specific installation in Glassell Gallery. She is a visiting artist at LSU for two weeks in February and March, when she meets with students and delegates installation tasks, works in studios with the students, and installs the exhibition. She meets with the public during a gallery talk on March 7.

Artist Statement
I often respond to the architecture of a given space by creating a site-specific environment that is experienced physically and psychologically. These environments are populated with forms that share a dialogue with modernist painting, patchwork quilts, minimalist sculpture, land art and fashion design. My references are vast yet share an underlying sense of order, pattern and structure. Tents, window displays, ethnic textiles, stained glass windows, flags for non-existent countries, Renaissance architecture, modern furniture and patterns in nature are all subjects that influence my work.

Within my process I am drawn to find dualities embedded in the materials I choose. I pair the minimal with the extravagant, the rigid with the obtuse, and the homespun with the haute. Experimental landscapes are built with color, line and light, creating a mini-environment or "eco-system." At its core, my work simultaneously maintains a strong material presence and a sensuous, experiential quality.

Rachel Hayes
“Materials are the muse,” says Rachel Hayes as she considers her art.1Her
fascination with constructing optical environments of layered color, texture, and
material is the base from which she explores a range of concepts and
applications through a variety of installations. By pushing the inherent
properties of her media — combinations of colorful sheer fabrics and translucent vinyl that she collects and composes by sewing — Hayes reconsiders material, process, and site. While modernist impulses arise in her work — de Stijl, Bauhaus, Post-Painterly abstraction, and environmental installation — Hayes’s site-specific application of synthetic, technologically produced materials evince the here and now. Environmental conditions including light, air, and space further inform her work as materials themselves. Hayes uses these materials directly and purposefully to viscerally transform a space; any referential aspects beyond this directness, such as gender or craft, are byproducts of less interest to her.

Hayes created Billowall (2004) for the 2004 Charlotte Street Awards exhibition at Grand Arts, part of a series of large, suspended panels of sewn vinyl and fabric. Two years later, Hayes earned an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and has demonstrated an expansion of concept through increasingly challenging installations. Hayes capitalizes on inherent qualities of space and light, apparent in a recent work, Pseudo-Luminous Slant (2006) installed in Richmond, Virginia. Deviating from the loose movement of her curtain-walls, the illuminated, angled, and taut geometric panel invoked luminosity and
precision in a manner acknowledging one of her influences, James Turrell.
Experimentations with Op-inspired black magic marker drawings on vinyl and acrylic on paper installations hint at new directions for Hayes to explore.
Hayes’s recent large-scale project at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, New
York, featured a dizzyingly dynamic, concisely composed installation. To create Transrevelation Celebration (2006), a giant, opulent quilt pattern of sewn fabric and pleather (a plastic simulation of leather), Hayes first documented the space, then proposed an installation in a large hallway responding directly to architectural components including columns and shelving units. Intensely optical, flawlessly executed, and transformative, the work’s strength and clarity demonstrate Hayes’s progression and potential as an ambitious, emerging artist.

— Heather Lustfeldt