Dylan Hausthor

Dylan Hausthor (born 1993) is an artist based on an island off the coast of Maine. They received their BFA from the Maine College of Art and MFA from the 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 passionate in the things they believed in, they hide secret messages in the things they have to say, and they should avoid driving Volvos.” They are a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.

Artist Statement 

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.

Smalltown gossip, relationships to the land, the mysteries of wildlife, the drama of humanity, and the unpredictability of human spectacle inspire the stories in these images and installations. I’m fascinated by the instability of storytelling and hope to enable character and landscape to act as gossip in their own right: cross-pollinating and synthesizing. Cultural systems, communities bound by belief, ruralism, the ghosts that haunt landscapes, and the disentangling of colonial narratives drive these installations, images, and videos.

The often-disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I’m interested in photography as a medium of hybridity and nuance—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.