Contemporary Rest 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 the University of Pennsylvania, Saatchi Art, the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Daily Record, and the Jersey Journal. The Penn Journal of Art & Sciences described his portfolio as “deeply introspective, exploring themes of isolation, contemplation, and one’s place in postmodern society...This exploration of space and structure is not just a visual exercise but also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of contemporary existence”. Michael 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 and online gallery, since 2014. Artist Statement: The assemblage art contains photography mounted on canvas combined with sketches on the surface with oil pastels and written text in ink. I take my camera with me almost everywhere I go as my photography captures my everyday sensory experiences. Much like a journal, the photographs identify and crop subject matter which I find has poetic and philosophical purpose in regards to contemporary identity. After the photography becomes mounted on the canvas, I create loose sketches upon the remaining surface with oil pastels which help 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 regards to image-making. 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.