Hanna Knowles Painting Drawing About Contact
Hanna Knowles (b. 2003) paints situations with perverse undercurrents that teeter on the edge of plausibility. She combines figures pulled from pornography, screenshots from social media algorithms, animals, found objects and imagined interiors to compose decidedly peculiar scenarios.
Inspired by the language of existential philosophy, she is interested in “the project of meaning.” This describes the feat of undertaking meaning-making as a self-responsible process in a universe without inherent meaning or reason for being. The human experience entails a volatile dynamic of profound meaning and grotesque absurdity. Her works explore the tension of being in a body as at once disgusting and divinely noble, simultaneously perverse and sublime. She is driven and moved by the tremendous tenderness humans exhibit, particularly in the remarkable sensitivity that precedes shame (sexual and the like).
In the chaos of mortality how do we contend with the will of things to live? How is meaning-making compromised in the disposable currents of the digital age? Her paintings and their imagery act as odes to what is meaningful, strange, and horrifying about being human. Taking from disposable digital excess, internet debris, and inserting found objects both in and around the paintings (a bedsheet, dried eucalyptus, a silver glove, a white poofy little girl’s dress), she represents situations with sensitive and charged psychological landscapes, bringing digital and physical almosttrash into compositions as constructions of meaning making avenues.