How can we simultaneously enjoy surreal art and spread awareness about the world around us? In her second solo art exhibition, Chromatic Dreamscape, local artist Paige Hashman answers this question through beautiful mixed-media pieces, and pairs each artwork with a poem that encapsulates its meaning. One often overlooks the joys and experiences of daily life, like “neon skies, strange joy, movement, memory, and color,” as Hashman writes in her artist statement. Luckily for us, her collection has arrived just three minutes down the road at the Brown Family Environmental Center (BFEC), reminding us of what we fail to see in life’s little moments and encouraging us to take opportunities to explore beauty in unexpected places. The collection also acknowledges modern ecological struggles to protect natural habitats and address environmental issues, such as ocean pollution, while celebrating striking, dreamlike and nostalgic representations of nature, animal life and underappreciated memories. 

“I think of it as a kind of nature disco, where the overlooked moments of life become quite luminous and the moments that we naturally cherish are just that much brighter,” Hashman says in the artist statement. “This body of work reflects the way I experience the world: saturated, poetic, full of hidden brightness and quiet but magical feelings we don’t always speak aloud.” With these inspiring words as my guide, I tried to see the moments Hashman painted through her own eyes, not just mine. I aimed not to question works with faces I didn’t know, animals I had never seen or phrases I wasn’t sure how to decipher; these memories are vivid and detailed in the artist’s mind, and it’s fascinating to see how they translate when we attempt to understand them from a secondary perspective.

Through this collection, the audience gets to personally explore a sliver of Hashman’s mind — a jumbled collection of memories depicting scenes of special places, family and friends. It features images that blend and fade into one another, with details that don’t seem fully grounded in reality. Her dreamlike color choices, light brushstrokes and repetitive thoughts hand-scribbled in the background seem to carry over from one piece to the next. Exploring the room, I felt that with each painting, I understood more about her childhood and less about her world at the same time. In works throughout the exhibition, Hashman stamped words across pieces’ backgrounds, capitalized and bolded (or hidden, so that I had to look especially closely for them) behind every image. Every memory has a caption that will never fully capture the story behind it. This artistic choice is what makes being an outside observer of her work such a beautiful experience; the collection wonderfully represents the fleeting nature of such striking images.

My personal favorite is a painting that pictures a group of lionfish in a bright, neon coral reef. This work is a call to action that questions the viewer’s mode of thinking, with its wall label to the side reading: “Beautiful / Invasive / Impactful / Deadly / Disruptive / Graceful / Venomous / Ornate / Ecologically Damaging / Oh, you thought I was describing the lionfish in this painting?” As the juxtaposition of adjectives in her poem demonstrates, it’s intriguing to see how Hashman’s work puts the audience in the spotlight and situates them within the larger issue of environmental justice. By using eye-catching colors to depict the coral reef, Hashman draws further attention to the habitat itself, an area in danger of damage from human pollution. Overall, it is a beautiful piece of work that, in my opinion, sums up the essence and message of the collection as a whole.

This collection resonates especially with Kenyon students: Not only does Hashman explore scenic moments in her paintings, but she also pairs almost every work with a short poem that undeniably heightens the viewer’s experience. Hashman’s work embodies, as my visit showed me, an intersection of disciplines that add nuance to her message and connects with the daily experiences of liberal arts college students. Her mixed-media approach to making art mirrors that of many talented students at Kenyon, and she cleverly weaves advocacy into the message she conveys, maintaining an unwavering stance. For this reason, I strongly encourage more students to give the exhibition some of their time and attention; Hashman’s work might just make you a more cognizant explorer of the world.