Camille Hannah
Camille Hannah’s works predicate a model of painting that is born from within the frame of technology; they are embedded in twenty-first-century gestural abstraction while conceptually vested in digital and screen technologies.
Harnessing the contemporary aesthetic of mediated visuality while acknowledging painting’s debt to art history, her work addresses the influence of the screen-paradigm through notions of painting as object/surface and the perception of interactivity. This interactivity, relating to a virtual form of tactility, traverses the paradox between the prohibition of touch in relation to digital technology and art. Interactivity relates to seduction, a correlation that enacts the ‘erotics’ of painting, seeking to engage the viewer immediately in a tactile participation—close and yet distancing—at the threshold of vision and touch, while simultaneously providing a variable experience of scale.
Structurally and aesthetically functioning along the lines of a screen, these paintings aim to incorporate some of the same spectatorial conditions established by a new screen paradigm, such as notions of movement and fluidity, arrested and caught within a painting frame, and the utilization of a type of perception based on the fragmentary nature of vision.
Artist Statement:
Hannah’s work speaks of fluidity, object/surface, and the perception of interactivity relating to a virtual form of tactility. Traversing the paradox between the prohibition of touch in relation to art and an ‘erotics’ of painting, interactivity relates to seduction: a correlation that enacts the ‘erotics’ of painting and seeks to engage the viewer immediately in an aesthetics of the feminine, utilizing tactile participation, close and yet distancing at the threshold of vision and touch.
Her practice, including paintings, installations, and soundscapes, demands more than our capacity to critique; it demands our bodies, the slow trail of an eye-finger... It is therefore not possible to view her work without incorporation, reflection, multiplication; offering an alternative to ways of seeing which demands a particular distance between subject and object, a vacillation, tactility. The viewing experience takes place as if between (at least) two subjects, leading us to consider intersubjective relations in an attempt to mobilize a possible other ‘female imaginary’.
