Artist Hugh Hayden takes everyday objects from school desks to basketball hoops to cookware and

transforms them into something surreal. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBAH Boston visits the

Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for a look at how Hayden's work challenges our perceptions

of the American dream. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Nestled on a field of white plushness, this home, quaint with dormers and window panes,

could read as the fruits of the American dream realized.

It's also like a row of bushes of hedges and this idea of like the collection of wood or sticks as a bird's nest, a bird's home.

That's the take of artist Hugh Hayden, who is a connoisseur of contradictions.

He knows his installation titled hedges will have myriad interpretations,

that these branches thrusting forward in a prickly joust can also read as a barrier to the American dream, preventing access to this home and the others mirrored in Hayden's infinite neighborhood.

It's like a fantasy, the American dream being like a myth or a fantasy sometimes of this thing that's hard to obtain or achieve

or difficult to inhabit. But it is possible to also, you know, find your way in it because also

the branches are also being protective. Hayden, who is receiving a major mid-career survey at Brandeis

University's Rose Art Museum outside Boston Boston dwells in dichotomy.

In the dual nature of frying pans as melting pots.

A finely crafted baby's crib with teeth.

And in this ladder titled Higher Education, with its teetering shears, it grows more menacing

the higher one climbs.

Or does it?

Some of them are open, some of them closed, but scissors or pruners or hedgers are sharp.

And, you know, it could be a knife per se.

But there's a notion of cultivation and education, this idea that, you know, education,

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