Falling Down

Mackenna Hanson

"Falling Down"

Oil and Calcium Carbonate on Canvas

2024

38x52 in. 

Artist Statement

Questions of taste, reproduction, and the meaning of surface—both as a material tool and a metaphorical concept—arise in my work. How the human operates as reproductive labor is a central issue in my works. To reproduce appropriated imagery onto a surface, with precision but not robotic exactitude, is a transformative process which combines both craft and concept. Little mysteries in my works (such as a stray brushstroke, fingerprint, or other mark of humanity) leave behind a trail of evidence of the creative process. When the appropriated images are combined with imagined or incidental marks, I question the meaning of originality and its valuation.

My paintings combine the history of painting with the present moment through the violent collision of imagery, both appropriated and imagined. The ambiguity of the image’s origins and the tension between subjects on the picture plane forces the audience to consider what it means when these symbols share space. By utilizing multiple visual languages in unconventional mediums, such as illustrative pop-culture imagery portrayed in oil paint, I complicate the meaning of mimicry, class, and artistic hierarchy. I activate how the figure is filtered and changed through such institutions. 

My drawings investigate the history of comics and their traditional use as an accessible narrative tool. Using the comic board as a point of entry, I explode the medium through various means: flipping the comic board on its side from the traditional portrait composition, ignoring pre-printed bleed lines and publishing regulations, and dissolving the use of the panel as a storytelling device. My illustrations complicate my paintings as my paintings complicate my drawings; both traditionally separated mediums inevitably bleeding into the other and structuring my unique visual language in which conversations of gender, capitalism, figuration, and storytelling can be had.