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Exhibition Opening - Hannah Secord Wade: Shrimp World
Hannah Secord Wade creates paintings of invented landscapes that depict fictional creatures, plant life, and environments that are at once familiar yet alien. Working in series that are grounded in a specific color palette, she builds and disassembles worlds in a process that she describes as a ‘cycle of containment and release.’ The containment is rendered through the gathering of plants, objects, architecture, and beings set in place to guard the developing scene, while the release is typically marked by water and air that moves through the landscape as a disruptor. As each series progresses, this cleansing acknowledges the futility of control and clears space for the evolution of alternate realities to develop.
The works featured in this exhibition are from a new series titled - Shrimp World - set in a place beyond time, where humans no longer exist. Drawn to the type of creatures - sea, land, and earth - that exist in extreme environments, Wade considers what might survive a changing world on the brink of collapse. Despite this seemingly dark backdrop, Wade’s paintings convey a sense of peace, calm, and adventure, where humans have become de-centered in the narrative of life. The drama and action depicted in these works are slow moving, hopeful, and beyond care - a happy apocalypse.
In Ozymandias Bath, for example, Wade renders a setting sun that is actively being swallowed up by the sea, desert, and mountains around it. Named for the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelly, she considers the comfort of the notion that even the most powerful will eventually fall. Through this series of 12 paintings, completed over the course of the last year, Wade brings a dark sense of humor to our continued political and environmental destabilization. Through the scenes depicted in these works, she creates hopeful alternatives for her subjects, and open-ended, experiential quests for the viewer.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3031403-0
