Intro to Hannah Finlator's talk
...And this evening’s visiting artist is no different – in some ways, Hannah Finlator and her work – provide an ideal example of what this program can offer. Hannah is a painter first, a painter who continues to find ways to reinvest art history - or a wonderful alternative to it – with valid and engaging contemporary issues.
She is a determined historian, she has lectured on forgotten or marginalized 15-17th century female painters – not to prove their equality per say, but to uncover their innovations, their visual language, and maybe more importantly – their suppressed and sometimes subverted narratives.
Hannah grew up in North Carolina, and finished her undergrad work in Washington, DC at the Corcoran. Hannah chose the Corcoran for a couple reasons, but the museum culture in DC was certainly top of her list. She was known as “that strange person who stands for hours at a single painting, scratching away at a pad of paper” – she haunted the National Gallery for hours, days, and weeks during her years at the Corcoran - which was a telling sign – as it was NOT the Corcoran collection (with it’s American focus and it’s close proximity) that she studied – but the National Gallery’s European collections that enthralled her. So it came as no surprise that Hannah chose graduate school overseas - She was accepted to Newcastle upon Tyne University, and she finished her master’s degree in Fine Art (with merit, no less) in 2002. Since then she has had shows at Henshelwood Gallery in Newcastle, UK in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2007. She also has had solo shows at the Fairfields Gallery in 2007, as well as her more recent solo showing at the Biscuit Factory in 2008. Several of these shows have had catalogs, and her work has been written about on many occasions. She also has curated a show, "Surface Tension", that include her work as well as two other women. It opened in 2005.
She also has been a Lecturer in Painting at Newcastle upon Tyne University, and is currently a visiting lecturer in drawing at the school of Architecture.
In closing, I’d like to offer a couple of ideas about Hannah’s work – things which have continued to resonate for me over the several years that I have known her and her work.
Hannah does not pillage art history – acting or reacting like a cultural tourist - she interprets art history. Or rather Hannah reinterprets, reinvests, or reimagines it. Quite possibly, as you will soon see, she does all three. Hannah’s work is not old school for old school’s sake. While it’s obvious she is invested in 15th and 16th century processes, Hannah brings a refreshing 21st century sensibility of narrative and playfulness. Unlike the painter John Currin, with whom Hannah may share some surface qualities with, her work deepens art history’s connection to our daily lives by investing the personal, and the family - back into post-modern concerns, without the easy irony, the easy one-liner. Whereas Currin’s paintings depict women’s bodies as a vessel for post-modern irony and caricature, Hannah embeds and redirects art history’s lessons – her women’s bodies are active, aware, and determining their own narrative.
That is not to say Hannah’s paintings are forthright, in fact they are full of mystery, puzzles and clues. By combining her family history with figures, characters, and metaphors from centuries before, Hannah provides fresh insight to the hidden stories both in her own personal narrative, and in that of her forebearers. Her work becomes both meditative and active. It can reinvigorate the past, by continually shifting time frames, landscapes and symbolism into something alive, both for her, and for us.
Her work in the widest sense, transcends some of the common assumptions of post-modernism by reintegrating the social with the personal and by genuinely exploring and appreciating certain cultural traditions, rather than dismissing them outright.
