Installation of “Heat, Map” at Vermont Studio Center’s Resident Gallery, July, 2025
“Heat, Map” (2025) is a series of work created while at Vermont Studio Center during the month of July in 2025. “Heat, Map” charts a tactile topography, one that moves between the granular textures of collage and the ghostly blurs of digital photo libraries, fluid marks, and accelerating vistas. Petals, moons, and obscured landscapes hover in overlays, symbols and snapshots drifting like coordinates in a dream. The title is a contradiction and a clue. “Heat, Map” is not a chart of precision but of pressure. I was able to explore beautiful rivers and wooded waterfall paths while in the summer Vermont sun, and found myself thinking often of the warmth of memory, and simultaneously the cool detachment of reliving the past through digital means and slick, zero-resistance surfaces. I worked in the studio to distort the edges of this duality, reshaping what we think we know of place, of lineage, of self. These works trace not a geography, but a temperature. They map how memory scorches, fades, and lingers in trace. Resin casts hold time still; mesh veils let it slip through. Doubled moons glint like uncertain beacons. This is a map you feel before you read, a record of presence and loss, of trying to locate something that may never have stayed still long enough to name.
Installation of “Northern Dawn” at Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX, 2025 (Documentation by Alex Boeschenstein)
“Northern Dawn” (2025) is an MFA thesis exhibition that explores memory, migration, and the fragmentation of personal history through archival photographs, traditional sculptural forms, and image-based installations. Drawing from a collection of photographs taken by the artist’s grandmother during a return visit to Norway in the 1960s, the exhibition examines how familial narratives intersect with broader questions of identity, landscape, and cultural myths. Through processes of printing, embedding, tearing, and layering, the work challenges the pace of contemporary image consumption, inviting viewers into a space of slowed reflection and tactile engagement. Northern Dawn combines synthetic materials and intimate imagery, reinterpreting traditional Scandinavian craft objects—such as mangle boards and weathervanes—in contemporary forms. Through the integration of collage, fabric, and embedded photographic imagery, wall-mounted works engage in a poetic dialogue around myth, heritage, and ancestral memory.
Installation of “The Gate” at University of Texas, Austin, 2024
“The Gate” (2024) is an installation-based series of work that investigates surveillance, myth, and the psychological effects of digital acceleration. At its center stands a 3D-printed sculpture of Cerberus, the mythological guardian of the underworld—reimagined as a somber, watchful figure surveying a fractured landscape of stretched canvases, inkjet prints, and sculptural panels. These modular forms are collaged, stitched, and mounted with painted and printed canvas, evoking the aesthetics of smooth digital surfaces while resisting clarity and coherence. Drawing on personal archive, classical symbolism, and contemporary media theory, “The Gate” reflects on the body as both observer and observed, and on the shifting boundaries between memory, mythology, and mediated experience.
Installation of “The Garden at Dusk” at University of Texas, Austin, 2023
“The Garden at Dusk” (2023) is a large-scale installation that explores themes of digital acceleration, ecological interconnectivity, and symbolic fragmentation. Through a combination of 3D-printed sculpture, stretched inkjet prints, and modular compositional elements, the work examines how natural forms and mythic symbols are distorted under the pressures of technological speed and mediated perception. Central to the installation is the recurring motif of the garden—not as a site of serenity, but as a space warped by data flows, collapsed timelines, and artificial reproduction. By merging synthetic materials with organic imagery, The Garden at Dusk constructs a landscape in flux, where the boundaries between nature, myth, and machine begin to dissolve.
Installation of One of One at MirrorLab, Minneapolis, MN, 2023
MirrorLab Projects, Backburner and One of One
MirrorLab is an artist-run collective studio and programming space located in the heart of South Minneapolis, MN. In 2023 Christian Hastad became a member of MirrorLab and co-curated two exhibitions alongside local artists.
Backburner (2023) was a group exhibition co-curated by Christian Hastad and artist Forrest Wasko, celebrating the work of seven Minneapolis-based artists: Lisa Kill, Casey Deming, Kristina Johnson, Madeleine Chicoine, Pearl Davis, Forrest Wasko, and Christian Hastad. The exhibition brought together diverse practices—ranging from sculpture and painting to printmaking, photo, and installation—and offered a platform for emerging and mid-career voices in the Twin Cities art community. Opening in July 2023 at MirrorLab, Backburner served as both a snapshot and a celebration of creative energy shaped by place, collaboration, and timing.
One of One (2023) was a duo exhibition featuring collaborative works by Christian Hastad and Madeline Chamberlain. The show explored themes of duplication, intimacy, and material experimentation through a series of jointly created pieces that blurred the boundaries of authorship and process. Held at MirrorLab in June 2023, the exhibition emphasized a shared visual language and highlighted the potential of collaboration as a generative mode of making.
christianhastad@gmail.com
Christian Hastad (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist from the quiet edges of Minnesota, now based in Austin, Texas. His work navigates the blurred boundaries between memory, digital acceleration, and material trace. Working across painting, installation, and sculpture, he creates objects and images that hold tension between mediated experience and immediate perception. In 2025, he earned his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was awarded the Academic Excellence Fellowship in 2024. That same year, he participated in the SOMA Summer residency in Mexico City, deepening his inquiry into place, time, and transformation. He holds a dual BA in Fine Arts and Sociology from the University of Minnesota (2020), and has exhibited work nationally.
Education
MFA, University of Texas at Austin, 2025
BA in Fine Arts & Sociology, University of Minnesota, 2020
Residencies
(Upcoming) Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, WY, 2026
Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, 2025
SOMA Summer, Mexico City, MX, 2024
Rafter, Minneapolis, MN, 2020
Awards
Wolf E. Jessen Scholarship for the Arts, 2025
Michael Frary Endowed Scholarship in Painting, 2025
Academic Excellence Fellowship, UT Austin, 2024
(Upcoming) VrX
After Hours Gallery
St. Paul, MN
May 2026
Acceleration Without Arrival
Visual Arts Center
Austin, TX
2025
Retracing the Rubicon
Visual Arts Center
Austin, TX
2024
Re-Imagining the Ney
Elisabet Ney Museum
Austin, TX
2023
Backburner
MirrorLab
Minneapolis, MN
2023
One of One
MirrorLab,
Minneapolis, MN
2023
Visually Similar Images
Holland East Gallery
Minneapolis, MN
2022
A Year In
Target Gallery
Alexandria, VA
2021
Starpower
Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Minneapolis, MN
2020
Cloud Data
Regis Center for Arts
Minneapolis, MN
2020
Collective (In)Action
Memorial Union Gallery
Fargo, ND
2019
Thaw
New Rules
Minneapolis, MN
2019