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
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the setting is predominantly Asian, there is a classical European sensibility in the models’ poses that evokes art historical references such as Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass.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.
