Hannah Israel
Bio
Hannah Israel lives and works in Columbus, GA. She is currently a Professor of Art and the Gallery Director at Columbus State University. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Israel has exhibited her work at the Poem88 Gallery (Atlanta, GA), Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta, GA), Kentler International Drawing Space NYC, The Columbus Museum GA, High Museum of Art GA, Zuckerman Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), The Vargas Museum of Art in the Philippines, Museum of Contemporary Art in Honolulu, I-Space in Chicago, the Krannert Art Museum, among others. Hannah Israel has received the Daedalus Art Grant (NYC), the Columbus State University Faculty Grant, the Creative and Performance Art Fellowship at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, IL, and the Artist Fellowship at Cornell University, NY among others.
Artist Statement
The nature of my work maps the relationship of our existence. I communicate moments in my life by illustrating how fragile language can be and how predictable our experiences can be based on the temperament of the world around us. I contemplate the fragility of the world by drawing beauty out of tangible materials. Without a specific reference point, I investigate my making through drawing and sculpture.
My process is imbued with a sense of intuition and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity from my travels and research. I create art that resembles subsets of sorting, shifting, ephemera, pasting, gathering, tearing, cutting, and patterning with a focus on paper as my initial material. I find paper fascinating because it relates so much to language that has been preserved. Through mark-making using materials like ink, graphite, and other pigments, I search to imply a new meaning or language that reflects our everyday information as a form of abstraction.
Imagined language is the root of my work. I am fascinated by cultures that use symbols, gestures, and patterns to create maps of both their reality and their dreams. This lack of distinction between fantasy and reality opens up the way we can think about our world. This paradigm creates a world of physical impossibilities and questions our presence in time and space. I am fascinated with the ambiguous state in which one can exist neither here nor there, a space in between worlds.
Currently, I am interested in searching for meaning in the marks people leave behind. Through my sculptural drawings, I create traces that imply residues or memories of past experiences. Simulating these moments is difficult to do without changing the initial experience. Simulation also threatens my own rationality and notion of what marks or traces can be because I want the objects to be real, imaginative, and symbolic. I don’t want it to stay in the world of hyperspace. In a sense, sometimes my commitment falls in a place of fear because the notion of the opposite seems too overwhelming to accept. My work becomes moments of contemplation. According to Lacan, the human subject is always split between the conscious side, a mind that is accessible, and the unconscious side, a series of drives and forces which remain inaccessible. We are what we are on the basis of something that we experience to be missing from us - our understanding of the other - that is the other side of the split out of which our unconscious must emerge. Because we experience “something missing” as a lack, we desire to close it, to fill it, to replace it with something, a new language, or a new way of understanding.