Aqua Interior Painting

Biography: Michael Athanasius Hanna is an assemblage artist, photographer, writer, and curator originally from Jersey City, New Jersey who has been creating art since the age of eight. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and has been featured in large exhibition spaces such as The Colonnade: performing arts theater in Ringgold, Georgia, the Victoria Gallery in Paterson, New Jersey, and the Atrium Gallery in Morristown, New Jersey. Notable shows in New York City include a solo exhibit in Chelsea at the Wix Gallery and a one year exhibit at Hogarth Worldwide in midtown Manhattan. Michael has been published by Saatchi Art, the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Daily Record, and the Jersey Journal. He works out of his art studio located in North Georgia and has been serving as the curator and editor of Aedra Fine Arts, an art publisher, since 2014. Artist Statement: The assemblage art contains photography mounted on canvas as well as sketches with oil pastel and written text in ink. I take my camera with me almost everywhere I go as my photography captures everyday sensory experiences. Much like a journal, the photographs identify and crop subject matter which I find has poetic and philosophical purpose in regard to contemporary identity. After the photography becomes mounted on the canvas, I create loose sketches upon the remaining surface with oil pastel which helps deconstruct the physical aspects of the subject. I then write texts with ink on the canvas with poetic passages which ambiguously describe the subject. The entire process, from capturing the subject, to deconstruction with a sketch, to philosophical scribing, entails a method steeped in a heightened sense of individualism in regard to image-making. My photography contains no Photoshop alteration and without any other digital enhancement in order to portray an authentic experience of my surroundings free of filters. During the process of capturing selective imagery from my daily life, experiences, and travel with photography, I build upon the image by fusing the photographs with integrative oil pastel drawings which establish new angles, perspectives, texture, and surfaces in which to engage the subject matter. The combinative and organic work becomes defined by process as even the written texts become open to individual interpretation by the viewer. As a writer and publisher, the written word has important symbolic significance to my identity.