MacKenna Hanson and I graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago together in May of 2025. She moved to Minnesota. A group of us from advanced painting still meet up across cohorts to look at each other's work, which is how I saw EXTRAS before most people did.
Thirteen paintings and drawings. It is her first body of work out of school, and it is online at the gallery now.
I am going to get out of the way and let her talk.
On what the series is
"EXTRAS explores the way that imagery shapes and erases identity. Through a variety of materials and processes, this collection addresses the global flattening of time, and the ways in which visual language is affected by this phenomenon."
"EXTRAS demands that the viewer become aware of what they are seeing. Seeing is distinct from looking."
On materials, and what they are secretly arguing about
Boys' Choir was the first painting MacKenna made on linen.
"Linen is not only a quality surface, it is a signal of sophistication in the luxury art world. Half-chalk ground is a historical gesso that has to be made at home and requires specific knowledge to get right."
Two yards of linen runs about $110, which is why she avoided it for years.
And then the image she put on that surface is a low-resolution screenshot of children in the boys' choir at the opening of The Godfather Part II. Squinting in the sun. Probably tired. No climactic moment, no recognizable actors, nothing happening.
She hung it next to an oil painting she made on a piece of cardboard.
The materials perform wealth and competence. The subject performs nothing at all. Put the linen painting and the cardboard painting on the same wall at the same height and the hierarchy those two surfaces are supposed to signal stops working.
On memes, and Rembrandt
One work is a screenshot of her own text conversation with a friend, complaining about a paycheck, rendered in wax pastel. The face is Homelander, a character built as a narcissistic authoritarian, repurposed here as a cry from the working class.
She is clear that it dated itself the moment it was made, because memes age out of coolness as soon as they exist. That is the point rather than a problem. It is visual shorthand for how cultural imagery can be appropriated, or liberated from its origins, and made to carry an entirely different conversation.
It is composed almost identically to After Rembrandt, a straight art-historical master copy hanging in the same show. Same composition, same lighting, same scale of attention. One is four hundred years of canon. One is a group chat.
On being looked at
Between Scenes comes from a found behind-the-scenes photograph from the 1984 film Amadeus: two extras standing awkwardly beside one another.
Their gazes do not meet. The man looks off-canvas at someone in his own world. The woman looks directly out, at you, which makes you aware of being looked at in return.
MacKenna connects this to Margaret Atwood's line about being your own voyeur, a woman watching herself be watched. She describes the work as being about the self-surveillance that gets loudest in small waiting moments. At a bus stop. Between dinner rushes.
On the surface it is about gender, labor, and cinema. Underneath, she says, it is about the act of seeing.
On beauty
This is the part I keep coming back to.
"An attempt to define beauty is inherently authoritarian, because it produces and imposes a unilateral and universal definition for a subjective experience. A work can be beautiful while being disgusting or funny or scary."
The rest of the series
Thirteen works in oil, gouache, distemper, watercolor, wax pastel, and ink, on linen, canvas, board, panel, and cardboard. Prices run from $375 to $3,925.
EXTRAS was curated by Amanda Pentzak and first shown at the Paramount in Saint Cloud, Minnesota.
How to buy it
Work at $500 and above is available by inquiry. Fill out the form on any piece and you get more photographs, the work on a wall for scale, and a video call with the artist if you want to see it in the room it was made in. We answer within a day.
MacKenna Hanson artist collection
Follow her at MacKenna's Instagram
Read more from MacKenna on Substack!
Visit us Formato Fine Arts, 100 W Main Street, Wytheville, Virginia. Thursday through Saturday, 11 to 3. Sunday through Wednesday by appointment.
Note that the EXTRAS works are held at the artist's studio and are not available for gallery pickup.
