Adad Hannah
Intimate
Encounters
September 1–December 30, 2012
"Artist
Conversation"
with Hannah and David S. Rubin, The Brown
Curator of Contemporary Art
Tuesday, September 4, 6:30pm
San Antonio Museum of Art
200 W. Jones Ave.,
San
Antonio, TX 78215
www.samuseum.org
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The international festival celebrating photography, 2012
FotoSeptiembreUSA, kicks off in San Antonio at the San Antonio Museum
of Art (SAMA) with an opening reception for Adad Hannah: Intimate
Encounters from 6 to 8pm on Friday, August 31. The exhibition brings
together existing works and a new series created at SAMA by Canadian artist
Adad Hannah.
Known for photographic and video works
composed in the tradition of nineteenth-century tableaux vivants,
Hannah often finds inspiration in objects from museum collections—as
in his video Eros and Aphrodite, which was produced at the Prado
Museum in Madrid. Hannah drew on SAMA's Asian art collection for his latest
project, Daydreams of the Drunken Scholar. In this mash-up of
cultures and bodies, local San Antonio volunteers (mostly artists) served
as models, and Hannah decorated the set with objects from the Museum's and
private collections, along with colorful fabrics from Japan and Oriental
rugs. Although the setting is predominantly Asian, there is a classical
European sensibility in the models' poses that evokes art historical
references such as Edouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass.
The idea for the exhibition emerged as SAMA's curators set out to
develop exhibitions that would echo the erotic overtones of the Museum's
main exhibition, Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, which opens
September 15. "I am always a bit surprised by the erotic elements in my
work. When I am posing the models and shooting the work, it is usually not
self-evident," said Hannah. "There is something inherently erotic about
cameras."
*Image above:
The Encounter (Two
Screens), 2012, HD video. 7:01 minutes.
Produced with the
cooperation of the San Antonio Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist and
Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal.
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