January 2020 - Creative Review Photo Annual: Text by Diane Smyth
December 2019 - CASTING OUT THE SELF v3.1: Text by Lucy Soutter & Dominic Hawgood
October 2019 - EIKON MAGAZINE: Text by Eric Vroons 'Casting Out the Self'
July 2019 - FOAM EXHIBITION BOOKLET: Text by Mirjam Kooiman 'Hallucinating the Real'
September 2018 - FOAM MAGAZINE: Extract from Kim Knopper's essay 'Concerning the Spiritual'
August 2018 - FOAM FOTOGRAFHIEMUSEUM: Extract from Mirjam Kooiman's essay 'Loading...works from the Foam Collection'
January 2018 - WHY ART PHOTOGRAPHY? 2ND EDITION: Extract from Lucy Soutter's recently updated book about contemporary image making
September 2016 - POSTMATTER: This is a recording of navigation through my online exhibition on the POSTMATTER website which included a commissioned text by Lucy Soutter.
August 2016 - PHOTORESEARCHER: Text by Lucy Soutter Expanded Photography: Persistence of the Photographic
EUROPEAN PHOTO EXHIBITION AWARD: Text by Sérgio Mah - curator, and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon. It was commissioned by EPEA for their award catalogue that accompanied a group exhibition which toured Deichtorhallen Haus der Photographie (Hamburg), Nobel Peace Center (Oslo), Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Paris), & Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca.
February 2015 -1000 WORDS MAGAZINE: 1000 Words commissioned a text by Lucy Soutter about my solo show at TJ Boulting Gallery.
January 2015 - ENDS MEET: A text by Pascale Cumming Benson written in a response to the project Under the Influence which was published in Ends Meet.
January 2015 - THE GUARDIAN: Sean O' Hagan's response to the solo show Under the Influence
May 2015 - THE LONDON OPEN: Catalogue text accompanying the work shown at London Open, courtesy of the Whitechapel Gallery
"The two works included by Dominic Hawgood are taken from his series ‘Under the Influence’, which derives from the artist’s observations of Christian worship in evangelical African churches around London. The series explores certain religious rituals, including exorcisms conducted via live satellite sermons, which are then broadcast on giant screens, transforming places of worship into filmed and televised spectacles. The artist employs photography, lighting design, digital image manipulation and CGI to create images that skirt the boundary between staging and reality, which flaunt their collapsing of the disparity between factual and fake. The results are perfectly distilled moments , removed from a contextual narrative, which recall high spec luxury advertising and film noir more than they do documentary. There is confusion and ambiguity in how each image comes to be realised; are they well-timed observations , to carefully composed scenes.
The light boxes and vinyl that are Hawgood’s medium further highlight the ease at which the rituals of worship can be compared to the rituals of consumption. By utilising the mechanisms of advertising to frame these religious gestures and props, Hawgood alludes to the mechanisms pf power that underpin systems beliefand desire - a hierarchy of influence established to convince an audienceto aspire to a greater truth. In these works, belief becomes a product to be sold and bought, like designed goods that promise the fulfilment of social ambition. This rhetoric of mass consumption is embedded through he detail and precision of the works’ installation, mimicking an industry standard of precision.
Ultimately Hawgood’s work probes at a the edges of human behaviour in a technologies, branded world; where theatricality and performance are accepted as truth, and transformed into reality through a force of will. We want so badly to believe that we accept what we know to be false."
July 2014 - THE THERAPEUTIC REAL: My MA thesis whilst at the Royal College of Art. It identifies a recent cultural phenomenon: literary and filmic re-enactments of real-life events that produce in their participants a kind of reality of the moment, thereby generating a particular sense of self aware authenticity for the viewer.
July 2013 - LE MONDE: An article concerning The Conversation which was exhibited at Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography.
