Art of Conversation with Hannah Henry

Another entry in our interview series, with the artist Hannah Henry. Hannah has an exhibition at the Rowan Morrison Gallery opening on April 4th. It was a pleasure to speak with her and I hope you enjoy the interview!

Steven Barich: Hello Hannah. Thank you for taking this interview. I’m glad we have this opportunity to discuss your artwork and art practice.

Hannah Henry: It’s a frighteningly rare opportunity. Thank you!

SB: You have an upcoming show at Rowan Morrison in April and I believe you have just returned from the East Coast for a project in Belfast(?)…

HH: Yes, I was a participant in Project M, a boot camp / work-shop of sorts for “design activism” put on by John Bielenberg. I could only take part for the first five days, but got to share in the project’s birth. We researched what the community needed, flailed, brainstormed and ultimately decided to give away free pie in orange hunting gear. It was a fabulously random experience. It was almost like a public/ performance art class, but with the outsized hope of changing the world…one pie at a time.

SB: It sounds like a very busy time for you—between the Project M and your upcoming exhibition—with interesting potential. How are you doing, and where have you been spending your time and energy lately?

HH: Busy-ness has become a way of life. Art-making is my professional identity, media production has been my bread and butter, and raising three rambunctious kids by far is my biggest time commitment. I am now trying to re-focus my tiny but thriving business towards more activist and service based work. I produced a Get Out the Vote spot for Spanish language TV during the presidential election and it was an electrifying experience. I funded and produced it almost entirely alone, but ended up having the biggest audience for anything I have produced since my campaign photos were on billboards in Hungary years ago [SB: Do you have a link for this? HH: pre internet. I do however have an image of me shaking hands Pope John Paul II from that era...]. And this was a message I believed in! I have always drawn a clear distinction between what I constitute as “my art” and what is “commercial”. But I’m trying to change that. It helps living in an idealistic time.

SB: We’ve known each other for over 10 years now, and I am fortunate to have seen, in person, a number of your series in photography, as well as a few of your films over the years. I’m curious: are you exhibiting a brand new body of photography for this show at RoMo?

HH: Small Ruins is new work and does look quite different from my previous photography. I consider myself an artist who uses photography rather than a photographer who makes art. The conceptual aspect of the work drives the process and the material image. The subject of Small Ruins—small sentimental objects—demanded a still-life treatment in the tradition of Dutch Renaissance painting and product photography. Light becomes a subject as well, one I am trying to use to lure the viewer into an interface with an object they might have otherwise dismissed.
I have been working in low-resolution video stills and then internet grabs for the past decade, often not even using a camera in the process. But this show is all about exquisite detail and the beautifying power of light. It’s liberating getting to embrace photography in this way again. This show at Rowan Morrison is just the beginning. It will continue as I collect and curate more objects to photograph.

SB: I’m interested in hearing more about how you consider yourself “an artist who uses photography rather than a photographer who makes art.” It seems like an empowering and liberating position, in that you identify as an art-maker first and foremost. What do think about the level of craft that goes into focusing a career on one medium, versus having to balance your attention as a multi-media artist? Can I even label you with that description?

HH: I have great respect for those artists who devote themselves to mastering one medium, but I think I would just become a derivitive technician in that kind of practice. Some of the photographers I most admire are Robert Frank, Ellen Carey, Michal Rovner, Lorna Simpson, to name a few. These artists all go beyond the lens in their work and there is a conceptual purpose to their use of materials. Photography is finally getting its sea legs in the art world and I think it’s in large part due to artists using photography in this expansive, rule-breaking way. This is the tradition I feel more closely aligned to than say Cartier Bresson or Dorothea Lange.

SB: Is there a direct connection between your previous portraiture of people to this new body of photography, which appears to present objects in portrait form? How did you come to this idea and/or desire to create these images?

HH: I suppose there is a connection in that I am again addressing love and loss, but by looking at objects people hold onto for years or lifetimes, not images that are floating around the web. The objects I photograph possess a kind of spirit connecting them to the person who can’t part with them. They are worn, torn, stained, broken, but not discarded. I am trying to capture the essence of the loved thing by elevating it to center stage. In my last grouping with the internet grab portraits, I was doing something similar by taking an ephemeral digital fragment of a person and transforming it into a permanent object.

SB: So, are all the images in this body of work of objects from other people? Have you included some of your own personal objects of love and loss, and would it matter for the viewer if they are known? There is often a “cult of the personal” when it comes to images that take on a personification or a personal relation to the artist, and knowing a secret or something shared on a personal level from the artist can invite added interpretation…

HH: There is one object in this show that is mine: the butterfly I made as a child, but no, it doesn’t matter that it’s mine. The rest are from others. I’m more interested in what other people horde and discard. And no, I’m not dwelling on the provenance of the objects in this show. I want the visible wear and the random nature of the things themselves to inspire their own narratives.

SB: You live outside the immediate Bay Area with your husband and children, and I’m curious how you stay connected to the SF Bay Area art scene. Over the years, I’ve known many artists to move out to outlying towns, but in doing so, they give up a connection to the “scene.” Is this an issue for you, and what alternatives to keeping yourself connected with artists and community have you come up with?

HH: I think living away from the center has broadened my perspective on what community is, and what the “art scene” is or should be. I have always preferred to see art alone and have never really liked gallery openings unless I’m there to support a friend. I’m terrible at schmoozing, which has probably hurt me. I have taught at CCA off and on, which has kept me current and visible when I felt I was on the brink of extinction. But now I find that if I am pulled in so many directions, I become fragmented. So instead of driving to S.F. to go to first Thursdays, I will instead save up my time and money to go down to L.A. to see Marlene Dumas or to Maine to learn to Think Wrong. I do stay in close touch with a few artist friends and these people are a life-line for me. It’s especially easy to become completely disconnected when children are in the picture. I like to say there is no room for existential doubt in my life, but the flip side of that is there is also little room for the random encounter.

SB: Not to be critical of your remarks, but in defense of an art scene—at least in the Bay Area—there is much more than gallery openings and schmoozing that abounds both in the main drag scene as well as the nooks and crannies. Random encounters are definitely important—maybe the most important—but also the invested familiarity with people who are trying to create, expand and improve how and where art is shown. You mentioned a broadened perspective on what community is and what an art scene should be…could you share more about this perspective?

HH: I get your point, and I do miss out living far from the Bay Area scene, but I have to be positive and philosophical about it or I’ll be miserable! By “broadened perspective on what community is” I mean that my closest friends here are a religion scholar / stay at home mother of four and a planning commissioner. They are intelligent and engaged and get what I’m doing. I did move to Napa thinking I needed artists as friends but it just hasn’t turned out that way. On that note, I happen to be going to an opening tonight in Napa at Nest and will do just what you prescribe. There is a scene here and I can try not being a wallflower.

SB: What’s next for you?

HH: I’m hoping this Small Ruins project grows in some viral fashion. I won’t be making giant prints of everything I collect, but will archive them in book form. I have a p.o. box set up for object submissions: http://www.hannahhenry.org/contact-ruins.html. I’m working to accumulate enough images to make a monograph that becomes like an anthropological catalog of artifacts. But beyond this show I am also reckoning with the changing role of art in our culture and trying to expand my definition of what my practice is beyond adorning walls. You asked apt questions of artists about the effect of the economy on our practice but I think the issue is even larger. I think our generation of artists has been staring at it’s navel for so long we’ve lost our voice in the broader culture. We can blame pop culture and commercialism, but it’s up to us to figure out how to change our role and speak to the wider world. I read an interview recently with Andrew Andrew where they stated something like “art is dead,” “marketing is alive.” I think there’s some truth to that but it’s also a terminally cynical position. I do think we need to re-frame what art is-not towards a more marketed, commercial identity but towards a compassionate, critical, activist force for good. Sounds idealist, I know. But I can’t help myself.

Thank you Hannah. And don’t forget, Hannah’s exhibition Small Ruins opens Saturday, April 4th at Rowan Morrison. Support local artists (and in Hannah’s case, extra-local…).

Small Ruins
A Show of Photographs by Hannah Henry

Show Runs:
April 4th through May 9th

Small Ruins is an exhibit of large-scale photographs featuring objects from the bottom of people’s hearts and drawers: things with a past but no longer a purpose. The photos depict an individual object set against a blank background, highlighting the object itself, and begging of it a myriad of imaginary narratives.

Hannah Henry is based in Napa, California. Her recent work, “Intimate/ Strange II ” was awarded the Jury Prize at the Bay Area Annual by Rene de Guzman, director of the Oakland Musuem of California. Working mostly in low-resolution stills and video installation, her work has been selected by curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Henry was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1972. She holds a BA in liberal arts from Harvard and an MFA from CCAC. She began her career as a filmmaker winning several honors, including a Cine Eagle Award. After being awarded a Fullbright Fellowship to Hungary in 1997, she worked as the official photographer to the Prime Minister.