Dane Youngren

My work engages with the everyday structures of the built environment serving transportation, industrial, and other functional purposes. The utilitarian nature of such constructions lends itself to a matter-of-fact presentation of these places which are typically taken at face value or even overlooked. I primarily work in the ceramic medium to create sculptures that reference architecture yet leave absent traces of life and human existence, leaving it up to the viewer to fill the void. There is a certain beauty we seem to find with older structures as they reference the picturesque, idealized landscape as well as the ruin. This type of fascination and initial captivation with beauty is interrupted by a forlorn and melancholic aura of the work where there is evidence of destruction and abandonment.

Creating large, open ceramic forms is a satisfying and challenging process which heightens the sense of the fragile, vulnerable nature of ceramics. Despite this fragility, the structures convey a sense of permanence but inability to fulfill the expected function. The imagery I utilize has connections to westward expansion and industrialization, but my work tends toward the antithesis of this process of development—the obsolescence, deterioration, and other by-products of industrial decline.