Dennis Hayes IV is a collector of found objects, a reclaimer of that which would be trash in the eyes of others.

“I’d rather try to take these materials and make them useful as a message and make somebody appreciate what was once going to be trash. That’s why I try to make it look more refined. A lot of reclaimed materials tend to have a trashy look and I try to avoid that to a certain extent,” he explains.

A graduate of the fine arts program at Alfred University, where he studied sculpture and video, Hayes simultaneously reclaims items that have already been consumed and creates a deeply layered commentary about our culture of consumption.

Square Blue Residue, opening at Re:View Contemporary on October 3, 2009, features paintings, prints, sculptural pieces, and installation works that continue Hayes’ previous explorations of portraiture of birds and abstract representations of elements of our natural world. Hayes’ birds embody human characteristics, such as eyes ripe with human emotion, and his paintings are rich with references to geometry and math, religion and science.

Deeply affected by an Audubon Society publication about decreasing bird populations over the past 40-50 years, Hayes chose birds as the means of providing a visual commentary on the devastating effects of humans, technology and science on our natural world.

“I use the birds as kind of a metaphor for certain people or certain aspects of culture. I’ve always been interested in religious portraiture type of stuff. [The birds] each kind of have their own little characteristics that I interpret to be certain aspects [of humans] and critique them.”

The message of Square Blue Residue, according to Hayes, includes governmental criticism and a questioning of man’s relationship with nature and of both the positive and negative impacts of science on the environment.

Hayes defines himself as a perpetual student of the world around him. He cites references as varied as Scientific American, the CBC radio show Quirks and Quarks, conspiracy theories and his regular hikes into the solitude of the woods as influences on his work. Working late into the night in his basement studio, Hayes’ art is infused with his curiosity and desire to learn.

“I almost look at my art as my school. This is the way I learn. I need ideas, so I need to go fetch them and I go and I try to study and I try to learn about my surroundings, history, whatever,” he explains.

In addition to the intellectual preparation Hayes invests in his work, he also spends a great deal of time working on the reclaimed materials he uses as foundations for his paintings. He has developed a unique process, tedious at times, in which using primarily old 2x4s salvaged from the garbage, he cuts and conjoins separate pieces of wood to make a solid piece. He takes great care to preserve the natural beauty and graphic interest provided by the characteristics of the wood.

“When I’m working with these, I think [the wood] is so pretty right from the start that I don’t want to cover up too much of it because it already has so much character to it. When I start working with boards that are already painted when I find them, I don’t have to worry about what’s behind [the paint] so much. I can create the texture and the composition, where as with certain boards, I can’t cover up that little detail or that piece in the wood. It’s too gorgeous.”

By using reclaimed natural materials as the foundation of his pieces and celebrating the graphical interest and texture they contribute to the painting, Hayes takes his bird/human creatures and places them back into nature, almost as if he’s lifted a detailed, humanized image of a bird and placed it into a diorama or facsimile of the setting in which it would have lived in the wild.

“It’s like Photoshop, with paint,” he quips.