Stephen Hayes: Selected Works

Artist’s Statement

I use three icons—a pawn, corn and a horse—to investigate ideologies that laid the foundation for the current ingrained racial injustice in American society. My goal is to open my audience’s mind to racial bias through my wall reliefs, mixed media sculpture and woodcuts. I work with everyday found objects so that I can give new life to disregarded materials. These fundamental interests originated in my childhood, when my mother would bring home old mechanical parts from work and encourage me to get creative with them. That sparked my imagination and was the catalyst for my art-making practices. I use discarded found objects in conjunction with newly made work to comment on values.

My current work fuses the past and the present, generally based on socio-economic cultural themes in American history: capitalism, commodification of human beings and their subsequent brainwashing effects. The emphasis on this recurring imagery creates a thread between individual pieces in my repertoire and lets me speak directly to larger societal issues that are rooted in the racial structuring of society.