HANNAH DUGGAN: Lost In Translation

October 6- November 14^th
November 6^th: Reception 4-6 p.m.
Artist’s Talk: 7 p.m.

 Pictured: Warped Amphoras, slip cast stoneware

Hannah Duggans research engages digital technology, media studies, and the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional mediums, she explores social and digital media, revealing tensions through materiality and representation. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all the work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen.

Within the body of ceramic work, digital imagery is printed on porcelain tablets appearing as faux printer paper. The digital space is a vast archive instigating and recording both private and social behavior. We rely upon digital interfaces to deliver essential information as well as for social interaction, exacerbated by quarantining and remote working wrought by the pandemic. Though viewed as a vessel of stability, the digital interface is, in reality, unstable. The information contained digitally is constantly shifting, updating, and refreshing. Despite its fragility, clay is one of our most archival materials; its stable, physical qualities serve as a counter to the fugitive and flickering nature of the screen. Translating digital imagery onto the static, rigid surface of clay, however, allows Duggan to mark and emboss subjective thought and feeling about the less accessible aspects of the digital. This materiality literally enables Duggan to engage with the effect technology is having on human experience.

The current body of paintings are made directly from cropped screenshots of my own internet searches. Through painting, she creates lasting, confrontational objects in physical relationship with the viewer, countering the typically fleeting experience of seeing content through the flat, distancing interface of the screen. Guided by algorithms, the internet is a visual network, and representational choices are relentlessly naturalized through digital platforms on innumerable topics from the contentious to the banal. Specific moments are captured that isolate these contradictions where thumbnails depicting global tragedy are paired with links for brunch recipes. The work serves as an investigation into the moral ambivalences produced in the viewing public