Glints and Reflections

The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House) 1 
2009, colour photograph
100.5 x 133.5 cm / 39.5 x 52.5 in. Edition of 5
51 x 68.5 cm / 20 x 27 in. Edition of 5

Glints and Reflections, a touring exhibition organized by the Musée d'art de Joliette and curated by Lynne Bannon and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, completed its first stop at Musée d'art de Joliette this January. More news to come!

Adad Hannah has become known on the national and international art scene through his original creative work that combines photography, video, installation, and performance. These intertwined modes of expression have generated the still: a video showing, in a fixed manner and from a frontal perspective, a scene skillfully constructed and orchestrated by the artist in which participants, whose gestures are fixed without being totally immobile, take part in various activities. Hannah’s works, living pictures, appeal to the fascinated and attentive eye of the spectator, who simultaneously sees and watches time-based images, thus experiencing the temporary in continuation in a new way.

Time occupies a prominent place in this artist’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. This is supplemented by a constant desire to diversify the means of animating a fixed image, beginning with capturing on film a pose that is held momentarily by the protagonists’ vacillating bodies. More recently, the artist endeavoured to generate the illusion of movement by taking a multitude of photographs of a body in action in order to successively decompose all the phases, reminiscent of the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).

But these are only a few of the parameters that characterize Adad Hannah’s art, punctuated by a diversity of notions that enrich his work, such as seriality, repetition, recovery, duplication, reflection, mise en abyme, and visual citation. Although these ideas are recurrent in his work, Hannah avoids the pitfalls of redundancy by creating images that are distinct in their content, though related formally and conceptually. This is why the order of the works presented here does not follow the chronological order of their production. Instead, it runs back and forth among the themes that define the narrative of his artistic practice, divided into three thematic blocks: Mirroring the Museum, Reflections of Artworks, and Lives Captured.

Lynn Bannon, Guest Curator