Wednesday, March 12 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Stephanie E. Hanes is 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. 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.

Aiming to unfasten the binaries of gender and sexuality in visual representations, Hanes uses 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.

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.

Born in Alberta, Canada, in 2009 Hanes 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.  They were one of six 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 several group shows at Lefebvre et Fils Gallery in Paris, France. Recently, Hanes exhibited Bronze and Glass works with Secci Contemporary in Florence, Italy. They have exhibited their ceramic sculptures throughout the USA and Canada at several museum group shows: they were featured artist at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Arizona State University Museum, The Fuller Craft Museum, and the RISD Museum Gelman Gallery. They have shown with galleries in Portland with Eutectic Gallery, Seasons Gallery in Seattle, Five Car Garage in Los Angeles, and The Untitled Space In New York City. Hanes is an Assistant Professor in Ceramic Art at New York College Of Ceramics at Alfred University, where they teach ceramic sculpture. stephaniehanes.net