2021

human pyramid

October 12 - November 12

​​Isla Hansen is an artist working to reinterpret and complicate the relationship between the human body and technological progress. She combines soft materials, digital fabrication processes, animation, real time media, and techniques from online DIY culture to blur consumer-producer boundaries and challenge the way in which industrial forms of production position the human body as analogue.  Her solo and collaborative installations, systems, and performances, have been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, MoCA Cleveland, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, NY, Guild Hall Center for Visual and Performing Arts in East Hampton, NY, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Isla has been the recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, the Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship, and Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier grants from The Studio for Creative Inquiry. Isla was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, where she is currently a full time faculty member. Isla has also taught at UCLA’s department of Design Media Arts and at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at the Ohio State University.

Different Skies

The exhibition title Different Skies alludes to the longing for escape from a current location or reality leading to the search for and successful location of a new place and the cover of new heavens.  “Under the same skies” has been a phrase meant to unify us. Residing together underneath a protective glass dome, gazing upward at similar views, we are to be content and comforted by visualizing ourselves as participating in the same action, with the same awareness, as others. There are those on the other side of this reflection upon our place under the vaulted sky. They relish the changes that are witnessed when moving through the world and how this is reflected in the relationship of the earth to the sky with them sandwiched in between. 

Different Skies presents the relationship between above and below through manipulated landscapes that alter physical space and the perception of organic time. Created with captured video and appropriated media, the works combine images of the world as they have been witnessed firsthand by the artist with media that is widely distributed online as relaxation streams and inexpensive products that signify paradise and natural beauty. The works span several years and are brought together and into conversation for the first time in this exhibition.

This exhibition is being supported in part by a grant from South Arts.

Bio:

McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place, real and unreal, and through exploration, question how we process that information to obtain knowledge. McLean received a BFA from Middle Tennessee State University and MFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the Aurora Picture Show and Menil Collection, Houston, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, North Carolina, Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria, The California Science Museum, Los Angeles, The British Library, London, and MOCA Hiroshima, Japan. Her work was selected for Off the Screen at the 57^thAnn Arbor Film Festival. 

McLean keeps her studio in Nashville, TN.