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Hannah Newman

About the Artist

Bio

Hannah Newman is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the aesthetic possibilities of social media and digital platforms as new vehicles for carrying language, metaphor, and nuance. Most recently she has exhibited in group shows with The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale online, Outback Arthouse in Los Angeles, CA, Her Environment and The Yards Gallery in Chicago, Il, Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR, and Neon Heater/ Real Tinsel in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has received press from Chicago’s New City Art blog, the Duplex Gallery blog series and the Boston Globe, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Oregon awarded her a 2017 Professional Development Grant. Newman received a Master of Fine Arts from Oregon College of Art and Craft and a B.S in Ceramics and Fine Arts with a minor in Art History from Indiana Wesleyan University.

 

Statement

The internet is a receptacle for longing, offering every object and no object at all. Rendering everything searchable, it simultaneously fulfills and perpetuates our desires. To investigate the mechanisms—on and offline—that fuel, direct, and satisfy our longings, I compose assemblies of video, objects, technology and language—disparate configurations that shift and intersect, like open browser windows co-existing on a bright screen.

 

Within my work, I draw on metaphors of water, clouds, and land as tangible experiences to relate newer human experiences of the internet and connected technologies. Translating these meditative symbols through networked mediums lends nuance and complication to familiar digital platforms. The physical and natural within my work become methods of seeing, touching, and understanding the often abstracted experiences of language and the digital. Alternating the physical, particular, and blunt with the digital, symbolic, and poetic gives shape to the essence of my experiences both inside and outside the infinity of the internet.