Artist Statement

With saturation and dramatic surreal composition, Harrison Haft’s work directly addresses viewers forcing them to confront hybridities between gender and reality, offering vague, delicate alternatives with sharp edges. Using photographic references, which he stages and manipulates, he wishes to articulate experiences of queerness and otherness that manifest inner turmoil through visceral ruptures of fleshy reality and psychological trauma through physical corruption.

In articulating his response to a harmful historical erasure of queerness his work is not true although it may be figurative. He does not believe that the truth is of quintessential importance, as regardless of whether or not documentative figuration was in the work, he finds that such experiences could not be contained by the canvas. His imagery does not communicate clearly, but he does not hope it will. Rather, his goals are to provoke a natural response within each viewer. You have ascertained for yourself exactly what goes on in his work but he does not care to offer you an answer. Each who comes to the painting will have already decided for themselves. Unable to strip themselves from the culture of the concept of an innocent and defanged queer sexuality, they will see darkness grief and suffering emanating from the paintings. Or perhaps, he hopes, gentle, loving, powerful moments apart from the world. 

By rendering imagery seen as so quintessentially modern in the vernacular of the old masters, his work could offer an anachronistic restorative gesture to the art historical erasure of queer identities.