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March Artist: Stephanie E. Hanes

Stephanie E. Hanes was born in Alberta, Canada in 1985. In 2009 they received a BFA from The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Canada. Hanes is an MFA Graduate of Ceramics at the Rhode Island School Of Design in 2017 and received the prestigious Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship for a graduate student with exceptional promise.  Stephanie was one of the artists awarded the 2020 NCECA Emerging Artist Prize. In addition, they have exhibited Internationally with a solo show at C.R.E.T.A Rome Gallery in Italy and a group show at Secci Gallery in Florence, Italy and several at Lefebvre et Fils Gallery in Paris, France. Their ceramic sculptures have been exhibited throughout the USA and Canada in New York City, Providence, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Toronto. Hanes is an Assistant Professor in Ceramic Art at New York College Of Ceramics at Alfred University, where they teach ceramic sculpture.

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About the art:

"I am interested the radical place of in-betweens and its relation to queer identity. The morphing/merging bodies, their hybridization, their unfixed nature, is a figure that is in open relation to the future. This act of becoming, is in opposition to normativity and is essential to questioning standardize notions of race, gender and sexuality. The emphasis on fragmentation and fracture, as well as on emphasis on re-assemblage transgress boundaries of the body alluding to potential transformation of the white patriarchal norm. This is a political and aesthetic act in which each figure participates in the pulverization of past traditions that were traditionally upheld and valued, these bodies shed skin, ooze, vertebrae protrude outside the flesh, it is a body that breaks out from its allotted space. 

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My work aims to unfasten the binaries of gender and sexuality in visual representations, I use the female body as a site of resistance because it is normally the site of repression and possession. These figures are in a state of flux, process and change, they are both vulnerable and powerful, beautiful and grotesque; Inverting social bodily hierarchies. By exploring the notion of the uncanny, it exposes the symbiosis of feminine division of self for survival. This investigation is an intense searching for an identity that will never be defined, its fluidity evokes a maximum number of possible future identities to exist. 

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 The grotesque body is not an ugly body but rather, nonconformist which opposed to the finished and polished. Conceptually it is used as a vehicle for exploring the effects of its repression, the uncanniness exposes the presumed familiarity of symbolic violence and its reaction to the female forms link to monstrosity. That is linked to the fear of female power and the anti-female message in Greek myth and culture, that still persists to this day.  By using the strategy of mimesis, in an effort to unravel feminine truths through mimicry of the “ideal” to make the unseen visible, and ultimately disrupting the illusion of singularity, which is contradictory to the multidimensional experience of reality. The grotesque body has both the potential for creativity and destruction. This deconstruction is to dissolve, to oppose traditional binary distinction. It is a critical practice of playing with ideas and thus destroying convention and giving representational form new thoughts."

Title: Psyche

Media: Mold blown glass, mirrored

Size: 11"x 9" x 9"

Year: 2022