Adad Hannah: Glints and Reflections
to
Kamloops Art Gallery 101-465 Victoria St, Kamloops, British Columbia V2C 2A9
Adad Hannah, "The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 8," 2009
colour photograph, 100.5 x 133.5 cm
Opening Reception January 18 - 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Artist's Tour with Adad Hannah January 18 - 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Join Adad Hannah for a tour of Adad Hannah: Glints and Reflections. The Gallery is honoured to host Hannah and his work previously on exhibit at the Musee d'art de Joliette. As part of his tour, Hannah will provide background on his process and discuss key ideas and works in the exhibition. Everyone is welcome. This tour is followed by an opening reception with Hannah attending.
Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He lives and works in Vancouver and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. This exhibition brings together key works made by Hannah in the past decade that focus on his enduring interest in the photographic image in relation to personal and social histories.
Hannah’s work uses intertwined modes of expression (photography, video, installation and performance) to generate the still image. His videos are presented in a fixed manner and from a frontal perspective, with scenes skillfully constructed and orchestrated by the artist in which participants, whose gestures are fixed without being totally immobile, take part in various activities staged by the artist. Often developing his projects over numerous months or years, doing intensive research and working with large groups of participants through community workshops, Hannah’s staged images draw on references ranging from celebrated historical paintings and sculptures to everyday lives.
Temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s work. He consistently diversifies the means of animating a fixed image, beginning with capturing a pose on video that is held momentarily by the vacillating bodies. Hannah's “living pictures” play with the fascinated and attentive eye of the spectator. In recent work, the artist has endeavoured to generate the illusion of movement by taking a multitude of photographs of a body in action in order to successively articulate all the phases, reminiscent of the chronophotography of artist Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).
This exhibition brings together key themes that define the narrative of Hannah’s artistic practice: Mirroring the Museum, Reflections of Artworks and Lives Captured. In these varied bodies of work Hannah explores seriality, repetition, recovery, duplication, reflection, the copy and visual citation.