Dana Hargrove, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee University, Scotland with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honors in Painting. She continued her education in the USA with a Master of Fine Art from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Hargrove is a Professor of Studio Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida where she now resides. Hargrove concerns herself with ideas that frame our perceptions of the land and our sense of place and space. She employs a range of media from photography, collage, sculpture and installed paintings including large-scale site-specific works. Dana continues to exhibit her work both internationally and nationally. She has recently exhibited her work at Lightner Museum; Rollins Museum; Start Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London; Orlando Museum of Art; Deiglan, Akureyri, Iceland; Alt_space Gallery, Atlantic Center for the Arts; Bridgette Mayer Gallery; and Greatmore Studios, Cape Town. She has received several honors and awards such as finalist for the 2017 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, National Young Painters Competition First Place Award, full artist-in-residence fellowships at The Golden Foundation Residency Program, Hambidge Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, CentralTrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency, and Greatmore Studios artist in residence in Cape Town, South Africa. Artist StatementLandscape, and how we manipulate it to fit preconceived ideals or corporatized molds, is familiar territory for my art practice. Whether I am exploring the urban environment with its homogenized grid of rectangular blocks, or examining how culture frames and re-frames landscape, I remain responsive to how our perceptions of the world and sense of place are shaped by human design. As a conceptually-based artist, I move freely between mediums, using painting as a familiar touchstone, yet often incorporating sculpture, video, and photography within my installations. My recent work includes spatially illusionistic representations and three-dimensional relief paintings, which offer synthesized versions of geological outcrops, cairns, or even cityscapes. The works create spare, simulated landscapes where my constructions begin to play with the space of hyper-reality. As we traverse the land, we may find our search for utopia leads us on a journey that offers, on the surface, little more than a façade of our ideals. Perhaps we need to go beyond the surface, past the representation, and back to the ‘authentic’ to find it. My work often takes the form of a shifting, sometimes transitory, monument that runs a discourse between the homogenization and capitalization of our spaces and our widespread experiences of displacement and disconnection.