First-Year Core Program Co-Director Megan Hildebrandt is exhibiting work at Hyde Park Art Center's exhibition Extended Self: Transformations and Connections, a group exhibition thematically linked through a physical engagement of the body of the artist as a mother – in metaphor, form, process, image, data or motion. Grouped into intimate “conversations,” the exhibition hopes to illuminate the importance of having other artist mother role models, and of building a community to support each other through the challenges of parenting and maintaining a creative practice.
Hildebrandt's piece, How Many Days Until Something is a Habit, is inspired by personal, lived experience in the artist's life. Discussing the work, Hildebrandt writes, "I am a young adult cancer survivor and recently had my second child. These life events have greatly impacted my creative practice."
Confronting my own mortality at age 25 and then experiencing the fragility and strength of birth, I have become obsessed with tracking time- documenting the small, routine moments of life that loop and repeat. I want to give the viewer intimate, personal moments that capture the both fleeting and endless seconds of being alive. The How Many Days Until Something is a Habit series are hand-cut paper pieces I created in the three years after my first child was born. I imagine myself as the paper, and the energy I give my children are the holes. Physically, the paper actually gets stronger and more durable structurally the more holes I cut. It is a series of work about resilience and growth.
Extended Self: Transformations and Connections will be on view at Hyde Park Art Center from October 12, 2019 - January 19, 2020. Hildebrandt's work can also be seen in the latest edition of Project for Empty Space's Maternal Journal edited by Amy Hughes Braden and Leslie Holt.