Hayden Stottlemyre
CV
Artist Statement
Home

Hayden Stottlemyre is an oil painter that from San Antonio, Texas who utilizes oil paint as a medium to reconcile neurodivergent and queer identity. In Spring 2024, he will receive his BFA in Studio art from Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Hayden’s oil paintings explore a conflicted identity by placing his self-portrait into collaged scenes of queer intimacy and desire, where he places his image directly into conversation with historical queer visual culture. He pulls images from archived queer publications and documentary photography to create digital collages from which he paints. Simultaneous to recirculating queer imagery of the past he asserts his place within it.

hayden.stottlemyre@gmail.com

Hayden Stottlemyre

b. 2002 in San Antonio, TX

lives and works in San Marcos, TX



Education

2024: BFA (pending), Texas State University, San Marcos, TX (expected May 2024)



Group Exhibitions

2023:  Fever Dreams,  Mothership Studios, San Marcos Texas

2021: Hallway Exhibition, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX

2019: Signs of Life, Southwest School of Art Russell Hill Rogers Gallery, San Antonio, TX

2018:TSI Student Exhibition, Southwest School of Art Russell Hill Rogers Gallery, San Antonio, TX

Artist Statement             

             My work combines self-portraiture with queer imagery appropriated from queer ephemera mined and compiled from online archives ranging from physique magazines of the 1950s to zines from the 1990s. Combining these images with self-portraits and photographs from my life, I create work that represents my identity as a neurodivergent, queer artist while recognizing the space that I inhabit in queer visual history.

            I create oil paintings from digital collages that blend the stylistic elements of drawing with the form of a traditional oil painting. Moving between minimal, gestural strokes and fully modeled figures, I call upon the ability of collage to place contemporary and historical imagery into direct conversations. Moving between fully rendered and implied figures, my paintings emphasize the slippery nature of human memory. Rapid, shifting marks become allegory for the unreliable biological rhythms that facilitate remembering. I translate my experience with found imagery through paint; creating an archive of queer imagery in which I am an active participant.  

Through incorporation of queer visual history, I reference a history of trauma and joy. My paintings are as much a response to the erasure of queer lives through the HIV epidemic as they are to the success of queer activists. My paintings are about the free condoms in the jar when I go to the smoke shop. My paintings are about seeing my boyfriend’s roommate’s PREP prescription sitting on the bathroom counter. My paintings are about giving queer people spaces to exist in.