biography

Gene Hracho has been hand-crafting greater-than-human-scale sculptures for more than four decades.  Upon completing his education in the Arts, he made a living as an itinerate set of hands, employed for projects that took advantage of his ability to bend wood and metal to his will.

After adding training in engineering to his formal education, Gene remained itinerant, moving between manufacturing operations, participating in the production of furniture, musical instruments, and troop-carrying helicopters, among many other things.

Gene’s studio practice always parallels his work in the industrial environments, with each activity informing the other.  He’s been driven by aspirations to expand upon a provincial, working-class upbringing by starting engaging conversations through these objects.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My creative work seeks to contrast dueling aesthetics, one evocative of the unrestrained imagination of a precocious youth and one representing the disillusionment that inevitably comes to temper it.

The sculptures are conceived with respect to the way that they’ll relate to a viewer’s human body or perhaps more by how I imagine they might have related to my own body many years ago, when I was quite a bit smaller.

The mixed-media constructions appear as relics of questionable undertakings that somehow managed to succeed in spite of the objects’ humble manufacture.  They raise issues of our callous disregard for the earth and its other inhabitants presented with an irreverent attitude toward their own pontification.