Dylan Hausthor
What The Rain Might Bring
May 2 - Jun 1, 2024
I was recently visiting my hometown and stopped to fill up my car with gas. I noticed a woman sitting outside the gas station drinking coffee and recognized her as my old ballet teacher. I sat down next to her and we caught up. She had been going blind for a decade since I last saw her. She had fallen out of love, started growing a garden, and found god. She had a small collection of freshly picked mushrooms next to her and handed me one, saying “Mushrooms have no gender, did you know that?”
Named after David Arora’s mushroom identification guide, What The Rain Might Bring is a cross-disciplinary project that explores the complexities of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of the natural world.
The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I’m interested in image-making as a process of hybridity—weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines between investigative journalism, disinformation, performance, acts of obsession, and self-conscious manipulation. Photography’s ability to promote belief is a power not dissimilar to that of faith. By using modes of making that are traditionally linked to fact-finding, I hope for the viewers and readers of my work to find themselves in a space between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.
All these images are from the local newspaper of the town where I live.
Dylan Hausthor (American, b. 1993, they/he) is an artist based on an island off the coast of Maine. They received their BFA from Maine College of Art and MFA from Yale School of Art. They work teaching ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. To help write this biography, Dylan contacted a forensic medium, who suggested that they “seemed like someone who was passionate in the things they believed in, hides secret messages in the things they have to say, and should avoid driving Volvos”. They are a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.