About my photographs:
My photography is a hybrid practice where I make small sculptural models and photograph them under controlled conditions in the studio. I do not achieve the effects in my photos with digital image manipulation or CGI, it’s mostly done in camera with elaborate lighting and only minimal post processing. While the methodology of depicting miniatures in a fabricated setting has much in common with the analogue effects of old science fiction movies, my motivation has more to do with things like phenomenology and epistemology.
Ideas that I relate to my work include the unknowable nature of the thing in itself in Kantian philosophy, or the myth of the cave in Plato’s Republic, or the current popular notion that we are living in a simulation. I like the idea that Kant lays out in his Critique of Pure Reason where the sensory experience of a perceived object is constructed in the mind of the perceiver. Hegel’s alternative thesis that the subject/object relationship is an artificial division set up within an absolute totality is also interesting to me. I don’t have any big answers to these questions, I’m just interested in luring people into a more ambiguous practice of seeing that complicates the subject/object relationship and creates a sense of mystery. Creating photographs that allow people to look closely at things which cannot be identified is one way to achieve this, because they are in one way highly manipulated, almost abstract, but in another way very concrete in their physicality, and faithfully recorded as such.
About my Drawings:
Drawing is the first art form that I began to take seriously. My activity grew out of childhood doodles and slowly evolved into a more involved practice during my teenage years. Various influences were picked up along the way, from things like alternative comics, surrealist painting, and flemish masters, as well as imagery from scanning electron microscopy, industrial photography and medical illustration.
The drawings went through a number of phases but eventually settled on semi abstract themes of biomorphic imagery, as well as geometric and architectural shapes. The meaning of these forms is not something I consider much while I am drawing, it’s more of a process of revealing the significance of the forms through the act of drawing. It’s my way of trying to understand what’s happening in the world using visual forms instead of verbal structures.
Bio:
Birch Hayes was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1972, and then raised in Seattle, Washington. He was driven out of his family home as a teenager and did not finish high school. He became involved in the local punk scene and developed an interest in drawing and painting. Frustrated with the provincial culture in the Pacific Northwest, Birch Hayes left Seattle in 1997 and went to New York. He attended SUNY Purchase starting in 1999, where he began making photographs and sculpture. He graduated with a BFA in studio art and a minor in philosophy in 2004.
After finishing his degree Birch Hayes left New York and returned to the west coast for a few years, spent some time in Berlin, and lived alone in New Mexico. He also dabbled in fashion design, practiced meditation, and struggled with personal health issues. Through these years he worked on drawings, even doing many works while living in his car. During the pandemic he secluded himself in a small cabin in New York’s Hudson Valley and made a new series of photographs for the first time in over 15 years. He recently relocated to Berlin.