Tag: hanna grace

w-y-s-f:

I’m going to be out of town, but I wanted to post a reminder that today’s theme is scars! I have eight symmetrical scars on my spine from an injury I suffered in 2010. While it was one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever experienced, and I deal with pain everyday, I think about how often artists transform pain. Brooke Eva looked at my scars and saw something else. Scars are healing. They’re the place where the cut was. They’re the place where the skin is growing over the hurt. They are your Earth’s earnings. Your transaction with time. A sign that you survived something that might have killed others.

—Hanna

Brooke Eva – Hanna Grace (2015)

I don’t–for once–have a raft of commentary about this image. It’s entirely too dark and the placement of the subject in the frame is governed less by any pervasive aesthetic logic and more presenting an overhead-ish view without including the camera operators feet.

That’s not really intended as a slight against the image. In being entirely too dark and given the prominence of the vertebral column, there’s a clear parallel with Sally Mann’s work.

However, I talk about Mann entirely too much and it’s seems especially pointless given that when you perform a Google Image Search on this image, the top result is actually a Sally Mann image. No one reads what I post in order to discover something an algorithm could teach them.

What interests me about this is the subject herself: Hanna Grace.

I noticed her work about six months ago and was so impressed with the inherent potential in one of her photosets that I featured it in a post.

Subsequently, her work as well as her commentary/writing keep commanding my attention–there’s something devastatingly insightful in the way she articulates her thoughts. And there’s a certain rawness to her presentation that applies whether she’s modeling, making self-portraits or explaining her singular perspective.

…

I’ve struggled in the writing of this post–deleting everything multiple times and starting over. I can’t seem to get the tone right. The laudatory aspects is easy enough. Since I legitimately enjoy her work. But there’s also something else I want to address but I’m hesitant…

In several earlier drafts, I’ve tried to suggest a correlation between Hanna and Francesca Woodman. That’s a little too easy and pat, though. What I see as relateable between the two is Woodman’s asymptotic approach to something not unlike malediction in the later work.

However, Woodman’s later work tends to toe the line separating curious exploration and experimentation from outright narcissism. In other words, the precociously astute interrogation of visual representation and gender identity grow that defined her work as a teenager growsincreasingly redundant and struggles to find a solid contextual footing.

Now I’ve read a great deal on Woodman but I’m unfamiliar with critical commentary that has taken issue with her ostensible white, cishet privilege.

That–in turn–propelled me to consider similarities between Woodman’s work and Ana Mendieta’s. Again, that’s probably to pat and easy a corollary but they were both wunderkinds, who were celebrated during their lifetime and who both died under similar circumstances–falling from tall buildings. (Although, it is worth noting that unlike Woodman, Mendieta was probably pushed.)

On top of those similarities, there’s an overlap in their respective tones–a similar maledictory thrust. (In fact, several of Mendieta’s performances invoke violence in ways I consider objectionable.)

Despite that, I find it interesting the degree to which Woodman receives adulation and Mendieta remains lesser known. I’d argue both are equally important. But Mendieta does–at the least–contextualize her work in a broader, historical sense addressing a more primal, magical sense of gender as construct. (By that account, she’s objectively more mature than Woodman.)

Grace’s work strikes me as adjoining these two women. The malediction is subverted into a means of exorcism and the context is intersectional feminist discourse. In that regard, she’s closer to Mendieta than Woodman. However, I do have to point out that in the quote with which Grace introduces the above image, I do think the final sentence is telling: A sign that you survived something that might have killed others. [Emphasis mine]

It doesn’t quite read as an explicit notion of personal exceptionalism. But it does beg the question how surviving something that might have killed others is somehow more noteworthy than surviving something that might have killed you.

Rendering death as an alterity is rather an odd maneuver given the intensity and rawness of the work. Especially given the momento mori of the above image. And I mention it not so much as criticism; more from the realizations that its often the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions between how we think of a thing and how we articulate our thinking about that thing which provide the most staggering growth in our work–creative or otherwise. 

Source: w-y-s-f

w-y-s-f:

—Hanna

Hanna Grace – Untitled (2015)

Given several years, art historians are going to have to grapple with the fallout from this prevalent notion of the ‘selfie’.

For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia considers a selfie anything where the operator of a lens based imaging device produces an image of themselves. I think that’s more than a little problematic since it conflates self-portraiture with the selfie phenomenon.

What’s the difference? You might inquire. I’m not sure I have an answer and even if there were a way to flowchart things so that we can easily facilitate a distinction, I’m not sure that will ultimately be a good thing, though.

There is an art historical trend of associating women with mirrors. The most unequivocal of these instances is probably Charles Allan Gilbert’s All is Vanity–where a woman (who in an art historical perspective are always treated as if they have a corner on the vanity market) is staring at her own reflection in a mirror transforms via optical illusion into an enormous skull.

This knee jerk association of women with vanity is disingenuous considering many of the artists who ran with this motif also painted self-portraits which would have required them to stare at themselves in a mirror for countless hours. And the resulting work would be seen as meritorious and not at all vain.

More recently–the backlash over the sorority members more interested in taking selfies than paying attention to the baseball game they were attending. It’s all just an extension of the societal double standards with regard to performance of femininity: the fine line between prude and slut and regardless of how carefully you try to walk it, you’re still going to be cat-called on the streets and it’s going to be your fault for being a a woman.

But beyond that what does the term even mean? Ostensibly it means you hold the camera and take a picture of yourself. But with the advent of loathsome selfie sticks, where’s the line? Despite the visual limitations of the selfie, the results are frequently more appealing than the ubiquitous bathroom mirror reflection image.

I’m not one to poopoo any of it. If your preferred method of ontology involves self-portraiture, I am 120% an ally. (However, I do think like anything else there are pitfalls–I’m thinking of the young woman who recently acknowledged her Instagram wasn’t as candid as she presented it to the world and the toxic effect it had on her self-esteem.)

But most of all I don’t want work like the above images by Hanna Grace to be lumped in with the sort of casual, knee-jerk let’s take a picture because it’ll last longer motivation of selfies.

Maybe it’s snobbery but a part of me thinks if you take the time to set up a tripod and think about your framing, there’s more going on than something incidental. Not that making selfies is always easy–I saw two young woman on the Brooklyn Bridge several years back spend close to 15 minutes taking and retaking the same image to get it right. I won’t deny there’s an art to that but I think that the highest that a selfie can aspire to is probably a well-made document. There has to be more than just capturing the moment.

And that’s why I like these images so much. I’d hate to see them termed selfies. There’s thought behind them. A sense of the tone of the room, dynamic light. But also implicit interrogations over questions of the cultural sexualization of nudity–the way that the shining through the top of the window creates a frame within the frame that is aggressively controlled and shaped by the woman in the image. It conveys a totality of personhood.

I’m not sure these are effective as examples of fine art, necessarily. The pose grows increasingly confident/less awkward from top to bottom. The exposure is best in the middle image. Also, the middle image makes the best balance between the space occupied by Grace’s body in the frame contrasted with the room as negative space.

If you take the three together though and sort of take the mean average, I feel like they are sketches that could be used as fodder for a truly breath-taking image.

Source: w-y-s-f