Jodi Hays was born in Arkansas and studied undergrad at School of Visual Arts and The University of Tennessee (BFA, Drawing). She received her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Art and has exhibited at Museums and galleries across the United States, including the Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, TN) and Bernard Toale Gallery (Boston, MA). She recently completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center and recently at the Cooper Union. She used to live in Boston but now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, back to her home in the south. You can view her work at the Drawing Center in New York.

My work since Vermont College has been a sustained artistic investment in the notion of celebration. In our culture we have societally established and accepted rituals to recognize "life changing moments" and significant events such as marriages, births and deaths, but it is in between these moments where people live their lives. I use the visual language of ceremony to investigate the in between, everyday celebrations. I work in various mediums as one way to open up address disparate but connected facets of identity. The work's constant thread is an inquiry of memory, image, identity and language. I am most engaged by working in series and repetition. Not, however, repetition in the sense of repeating the same thing that undermines individuality, but a succession of images that heightens difference--one that allows variation. The more things close down, the more they open up--the Deluzian notion of repetition as becoming. Space is important in my work, implied/psychological as well as real/physical. The single channel video "Time in the Country" was shot exclusively at my grandmother's house in Glenwood, Arkansas. Not only does the work address space, but also time (era) and nostalgia.

VISIT: www.jodihays.com