Maria Haag is an artist living and working in Dallas, Texas. She grew up in North Dakota, living in rented farmhouses and exploring abandoned barns. After moving to Kansas, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas and her Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from the University of North Texas. In 2014 she received the Charles and Margaret Pollack art purchase award from the Mulvane Museum in Topeka, Kansas, and has gone on to participate throughout 2017, 2018 and 2019 in Dallas in Prizzi, a community inspired mural project in the town of Prizzi, Sicily. Her work has been displayed regionally and nationally.
Artist Statement:
The embodied creature is caught in a cycle of destruction and transformation. In flux, it defies definition. I capture bodies hovering between decay and transformation, broken images whirling through a maelstrom. The physical surfaces I create mirror the transitions of physical and spiritual bodies. Their fragility is reflected in broken lines and crusted layers of paper, charcoal, paint, and collage.
Characters and spaces that have informed my imagination construct my work: heroes, saints, and villains, all set in a framework of abandoned farms and empty towns. Pieced together, these fragments tell new stories, possibilities of new realities. I reveal dreams and currents concealed beneath the ordinary by a conscious violence, digitally and physically fracturing and combining images, tearing and marking over previous layers to create a puncture in what is, in order to open space for what lies beneath.
CV:
Projects:
Dallas in Prizzi 2017, 2018, 2019
Publications:
North Texas Review, 2019
Inscape Magazine, 2014
