Listening to These Days by Nico from 1967. It naturally makes me think about Hannah and her art. I have added the song to our shared playlist one day thinking “Hannah likes songs from 60s”. Turned out it is one of her favorites. One might say it’s a lucky guess but actually it was barely surprising to me.
If you were to enter Hannah’s studio, the first thing you notice is that her artworks have incredibly mark-heavy gestures of post-minimalist imagery. There are always some sort of rug-looking textiles laying around, or old foams, or half-destroyed wooden panels all ready to be painted in mustard yellows, swampy greens, Payne’s greys, etched with dull scissors, sewn together with that ridiculously large needle of hers and continuously balding hemp strings, overlaid with clay as substitute of glue - all Frankensteins in the making.
Here is a half whacked out theory about Hannah.
If you hang out with her even for a little bit you’ll be quick to make notes of her taste. Her music playlists mostly consist of Woodstock ‘69 and Swinging 60s era music - funky guitars, trippy melodies, and endless groovy solos. Most of Hannah’s closet either comes directly from the same time period (thanks to endless thrift store trips) or from brands which try to imitate a similar style today. As with her paintings, there are lots of mustard yellows, murky greens, rich varieties of browns and dark oranges: Dr. Martens shoes, turtle-necks, tight sweaters, lots of colorful patterned button ups, corduroy pants, flair jeans, cardigans, overalls, and jumpsuits most covered in stripes or paisleys. And Hannah’s selection of books and movies are not far from her clothes: Jack Kerouac, Bukowski’s End of Earth poems, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, Blow-up, Jaws, Young Frankenstein, and the list goes on. Some of the Hannah’s all time art picks also land within a similar zone: Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, and absolute hate for Carl Andre.
The most fascinating detail in all of this is that when I asked Hannah head on, “So, what happened in your teenage years that got you so inspired by 60s and 70s that it so naturally enters your art practice?” she just stared at me with complete astonishment saying, ”What do you mean?” I couldn’t believe how oblivious she was to her own preferences (which, for a quick second, all her friends take a notice of). This reaction left me furious, restless and in complete denial! I had to figure out how did this happen!
Here is another interesting fact about Hannah - she is very much attached to her family tree. She loves to recite her full knowledge of the subject at any given opportunity. Her favorite part is about skipping generations. Hannah’s grandmother, Blanche, gave birth to her mother, Rebecca, arguably late in life at the age of 42. Rebecca in turn as well decided to have two charming girls before making a commitment to a third one (Hannah) at the age of 38. Technically, as Hannah enjoys envisioning it, these two setbacks are the reason she has skipped two generations. Commonly, a generation is considered to be around 20-25 years. This means that if Hannah, who was born in 1995, got into this world on time she would be born in 1945 or 1955. In turn, it means that by her 20s it would be 1965 or 1975. Finally, this time and math magic brings me to my main point. I believe that Hannah’s fascination with the 60s and 70s derive from the skipped generation theory. It’s almost as if her DNA was a tad overdue to manifest in 1995.
Yet, Rebecca was born when Blanche decided it is time to be so, and Hannah was born whenever it was Rebecca’s time to make that decision, and now we are here. Despite all these generational skips and supposed predisposition towards certain time periods, it is still today that Hannah has to grapple with life through her artistic approaches. A rigid labor full of scratches and stitches is evident in her works because of the longing for enduring monotonous craft ethics, which is continually erased by machine production. A desire to look for old discarded surfaces, funky stitchery books, and materials is a search for incremental aura leftovers scarcely scattered throughout garage sales, independent salvage yards, and other dump-stores doomed in post-gentrified-chain-profit-driven-digitised-consumer culture. An impulse to navigate space through grounded materiality in order to oppose 3D-augmented digital realities. An opposition rooted in 60s-70s aesthetics and manifested through the generational skipping.
Arti Struyanskiy: https://www.artishlyapa.com/ / @artishlyapa
Hannah Möller: https://www.hannahmoller.com/
Images and text are courtesy of Arti Struyanskiy
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