Kevin Hanley, who had I-20’s inaugural show in 1997, returns on Saturday, September 13th with an exhibition that demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in the elusive nature of perception.
In looking at paintings like Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian and David’s Death of Marat, Hanley pondered how such works represent historical deaths and stimulate interpretations of certain events. In the title work of his show, the artist decided to approach this subject without waiting for an inevitable historical event to occur.
On Another Occasion (2002), which premiered at the Venice Biennale, offers a direct look at the slippery relationship between time, memory, and reason. Out of a blurry color field – which is formless for the larger part of the video’s duration – emerges a picture. The image that materializes is, at least for the present time,
a fiction created by digitally altering a recent photograph of a contemporary public figure. Early in the video, the viewer’s imagination works for a conclusion the eyes can’t yet reach. (Is this something I recognize?)
At the moment of visual clarity the viewer may try to piece together a relative conclusion. (What does the picture mean, and what will be the series of events that will surround this occasion?) The viewer is invited
to experience two different ways of using his or her imagination; and upon watching the full video (3 minutes,
23 seconds) a real space between seeing and reason is made apparent.
Impressionist painting impacts Hanley’s second video. Given Time (2003) is an experiment in articulating time, motion, and color. On the one hand, the video is like a primer for moving pictures: the passage of its frames creating the illusion of movement and the implied passage of time. But by separating each frame of the video into red, green, or blue, the artist has also isolated the most basic colors in the medium so that the color can only appear as natural when the video frames pass in time. For the artist, this means introducing a second overall and unrelated articulation of time to accompany the basic articulation of movement in video. The title Given Time refers to the color that one sees at a given time – as well as to the fact that the sun-tanning star
of the video, bikini model Amy Cravitz, is herself changing color in time.
The photographs on exhibit reinforce some of the themes in the two videos. Surface (2003) is a tall photo of what appears to be a lake surface shot in extreme depth of field, littered with leaves. Upon closer inspection, one realizes that the image is of a littered asphalt parking lot crossed by shadows. Resemblance #2 and Resemblance #3 are portraits of two friends that use cropping, depth of field, and particular physical attributes to encourage subtle confusion in seeing overall facial geometry. These portraits emphasize the complexity
in the visual description of a face without any reliance on the psychological power of facial expression.
Kevin Hanley had recent solo exhibitions at ACME. in Los Angeles, and Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo. This summer his work was shown at the 50th Venice Biennale, and “Uneasy Space” at SITE Santa Fe. The artist
is the co-founder of Microinternational, a L.A./Berlin based performance art collective (www.microint.org). Hanley was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and received his MFA at the Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena.