Watne and Woolley work collaboratively, under the name Hard Stop, to produce art interventions that examine the rhetoric of mass-media and explore how images communicate, persuade, and seduce. 

Davin Watne is an artist based in Kansas City with an established record of professional achievement. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994 and his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. He has been awarded the Charlotte Street Foundation Award, ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, Avenue of Arts Municipal Arts Grant, Art in the Loop Public Arts Grant and a former resident of the Studios Inc. Residency Program. Davin holds a full-time lecturer position at University of Missouri Kansas City, where he teaches Painting and Drawing. Davin is also the head curator and director of the UMKC Gallery of Art.  



Dawn Woolley is an artist and research fellow at Leeds Arts University, UK. She completed an MA in Photography (2008) and PhD by project in Fine Art (2017) at the Royal College of Art. Her thesis Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification is due to be published in 2021 by I B Tauris. Recent solo exhibitions include; “Consumed: Stilled Lives” Perth Centre for Photography, Australia, (2021), “Dance for Good & Exercise Your Rights” Public Space One gallery, Iowa City, (Hard Stop 2020), “Consumed: Stilled Lives” Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds (2019), and Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2018); “Visual Pleasure”, Hippolyte Photography Gallery, Helsinki, Finland (2013), Vilniaus Fotografijos Galerija, Lithuania (2012) and Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2011) and “The Substitute”, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University (2010).