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CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION UPCOMING EXHIBITION: ![]() 17 May - 5 July 2008 Adad Hannah: Reflections Vernissage: Saturday, May 17th from 2:30pm - 5:00pm (the artist will be in attendance) |
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ABOUT THE SHOW
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by video artist and photographer Adad Hannah. Hannah was recently announced as a 2008 semi-finalist for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. The tension of anticipated movement captivates the viewer as she mirrors the work while watching it. Both viewer and subject stand still, waiting for the other to succumb. As the viewer experiences the crux of spectatorship, she is forced to consider her own performance within the gallery, and thus her relationship to art. In his photographs and videos, Hannah explores the reception of art by embedding mirrors in museums. In a solipsistic move, he manipulates canonic works that interrogate the viewing process and offer a meditation on duality. In Two Mirrors, shot at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Hannah inserts two men and a mirror into Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Although they share only one mirror, Hannah’s title refers to the painted one above, believed to reflect the king and queen posing for their portrait. Velázquez implicated the viewer to a privileged position, just as Hannah situates the viewer to appear through a mirror at the two men staring back. For Performance/Audience/Remake, Hannah re-stages Dan Graham’s seminal Performance/Audience/Mirror (1975), in which Graham described his own actions and those of his audience as he stood between the attentive crowd and a mirrored wall. Graham’s performance was documented in a video, which Hannah mimics in his work. Rather than re-enact the entire performance, Hannah staged the scene for the camera, creating a series of “faux photographs,” videos in which surrogates for Graham and the audience stay motionless. Mirroring is a paramount motif in Hannah’s photographs and videos, developed from an interest in distinguishing image from object, and representation from reality. He conflates the replica with its subject, asking us to consider what the difference holds at stake. |