NEGATIVE SPACE: DAVID HARTT

David Hartt’s photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations offer a sensitive and concise portrait of our post-industrial, post-communist, late-capitalist societies. The artist creates work that unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. For Hartt, “place” is a way to investigate community, narrative, ideologies, and the intersection of private and public life.

In his first exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte David Hartt will present a new photographic series alongside a new film whose genesis began with a series of photographs by Robert Rauschenberg, who in the fall of 1980 had documented his journey along the East Coast of the United States from Long Island to Captiva, Florida. Hartt for his works has repeated this journey across the so-called Northeast megalopolis using a drone camera to capture the territory covered. Hartt’s portrait of the landscape shows it as defined by the reversal of urban to suburban migration patterns, an extreme concentration and stratification of wealth and power on the one hand and the marginalization and displacement of industry and the emergent precarity of environmental catastrophe on the other.

Narrated by Professor Francis Fukuyama Hartt’s film is grounded in the genre of the documentary, but infused with both scientific and Sci-Fi references thus making history and fantasy interact.