Montreal-based artist Adad Hannah’s work is witty, playful and slightly unsettling. The reflections and sly distortions of perception created by Hannah’s hybrid, highly conceptual work catch you off guard. Nothing is quite where or what it seems. What appears at first look to be a photographic re-enactment of Géricault’s epic painting The Raft of the Medusa is transformed when one of the figures on the raft blinks. A spatial and temporal dislocation occurs as you realize the models are breathing. They’re alive, yet they’re still an image, whether captured on video, photo or in paint. Unexpected things are going on both above and under the beautiful, permeable surface of Hannah’s playful work.
 

“My parents are actually clowns,” says Hannah, discussing how performance informs his work, from his stylish, decidedly uncircuslike studio in the Plateau. Hannah toured, performing with his parents until adolescence made being a clown less appealing. After graduating from Emily Carr in Vancouver, he was part of a performance art group. “It was called the Human Faux Pas, and there were five of us. We made a couple of art bombs.” Though he’d methodically taken photographs most of his life, it was only while studying at Concordia that deconstructing video and perception became his focus. Now he makes perception bombs, images and experiences that get inside your mind, exploding time and gently opening meaning.

Agents of history
“I think trusting viewers is very important,” says Hannah, whose articulate, provocative work has been seen by audiences from Shanghai to Berlin. “I can make work that addresses my interests, and I think some are readable, but there’s also always a negotiation between the viewer and the work that creates a new meaning and, by not having it too sealed, it’s slightly more interesting.” He’s wary of being didactic or too hermetic, of shutting down cultural conversation instead of igniting it.
 

“In a way I feel like all the info about paintings is something you can access really easily but it shouldn’t be right there somehow,” says Hannah, explaining how he prefers to view art on his own terms and present his own work to be read. “So when you come to it, you bring all your own stuff, you trust your own readings, and then you want to know the history. It’s not to devalue the history, it’s to value one’s own role as a historical agent.

Hannah’s work feasts on art history – from historical paintings to Rodin’s sculptures, both as filmed recreations and integrated into museum installations using mirrors. His work reflects upon the past, but is ultimately a searingly contemporary meditation on how time changes meaning and technology extends and shifts our gaze. From the humanizing of his models, both living and historical, to the way Hannah cheekily plays games with perception, there’s something very democratic about his work, despite the intellectual and aesthetic sophistication. It’s as if Hannah is himself winking at us, questioningwhat we see as he breaks tradition.

BGL/Pascal Grandmaison/Adad Hannah/Karen Tam exhibit
October 8 to January 2, 2011
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal | 185, Ste-Catherine W.
macm.org | adadhannah.com