Text by Matt Jones
In 2015, Hanna Pettyjohn’s two solo exhibitions — “By Land or By Air” at Silverlens Galleries in Manila and “A Web of When and Where” at Mind Set Art Center in Taipei — continued the process of deconstruction, reconstruction, and reflection that informed so much of her past work. The paintings and accompanying installations comprise a study in the passage of time as well as all other passages; a migratory mentality known to all who live away from home.
As the perpetual traveler learns, lightness is not only more efficient; it is often essential. At 12” x 16”, Pettyjohn created paintings for both 2015 shows that were distinctly smaller than any since the concise and arid landscapes of her 2011 exhibition, “Few and Far Between,” which conveyed a sense of isolation during a road trip through desolate flat lands. Some sparseness remains in the white backdrop of the new small works, thick and stippled, interrupted by dripping earthen tones that run down and off the edge of the canvas, stretching into the unseen.
Thus framed by light and dark, cloud and mud, wet earth against brittle sky, many of the subjects from this series of paintings are the self-same swaths of cloth seen in works from her three exhibitions held in Manila and Taipei separately during 2013, “Bundle,” “The Glass Between Us (Unbundle),” and “Witherland.” In those shows, Pettyjohn experimented with and expanded her vocabulary of images and textures, exposing them to varying characteristics of light, focus and environment. In the first two shows, “Bundle” and “The Glass Between Us (Unbundle),” the same textile materials were portrayed in both portrait and still life formats allowing the exploration of conditions such as warmth and cold, interior and exterior, fabric and flesh. Concluding with “Witherland,” Pettyjohn discarded these distinctions by combining the contrasting elements through manipulation. In the new works, the fragments appear abstracted from any context of setting or collage, achieving an effect somewhere between singular focus and compartmentalization.
Like flotsam adrift, each of the smaller paintings refers to an absent whole. In truth, four larger paintings from “A Web of When and Where” provided visual components which were then plucked and arranged into isolated formations. Assembled in groups or standing alone, all of the paintings share the title Unearthed appended by a signifier (letter or number) pointing towards their role as source or reference.
Within the larger paintings, the bits of cloth are set atop a bed of broken soil and scant vegetation as viewed from directly overhead. A light blue tarp protrudes tentatively from beneath the ground, buried haphazardly by time, wind, and indifference. The angle and content, if not the scope, recall two paintings of aerial maps from Pettyjohn’s 2010 exhibition “Year of Glad.” Including two other paintings based on old photographs of her maternal and paternal grandparents, “Year of Glad” depicted the people and places that made up her own family history. The four chambers that were constructed to house the paintings were filled alternately with wooden crates or arrows in stacked or scattered arrangements. Here, an excavation of the past proceeds, on a more precise scale, through the examination of items discarded and discovered. Each scrap of blanket, curtain or coat becomes a relic of the past worthy of its own story to tell.
Staged in a row, as they were in “By Land or By Air,” the smaller paintings form a catalogue of visual echoes portending an assessment of alternate manifestations, further complemented by an installation of wooden crates positioned below each painting. Besides offering a further connection to “Year of Glad,” the crates embody a distorted lens through which to view each of the paintings. Inside the crates, pieces of fabric cut to fit were imposed with the image of dry earth, wherein a jagged portion of the center was removed to expose raw, chaotic smears of color — the actual sheets of plastic that Pettyjohn mixed her paint on. In this way, Pettyjohn created her own artifacts revealing traces of the very creation of her art, from concept to execution and beyond.
With “A Web of When and Where,” the large and small paintings were displayed in the same space, further opening the conversation between differing representations. In addition to incorporating the corresponding lids to the prior crates, below each painting were drops and pools of cracked clay, according to the painting’s size. Creating an impression that the streaks within the paintings reached all the way to the gallery floor, the clay also reinforced that the subjects of the smaller paintings, though disembodied, represented tangible objects and that the paintings exist in a temporal reality of movement rather than standing as permanent fixtures.
Viewed together, the paintings, crates and streaks of clay in these shows form an apt representation of Hanna Pettyjohn’s evolving artistic process. Splitting her time between Manila and Texas, the act of packing and unpacking has become second nature to her. In recent years she produced her paintings primarily in America and became adept at anticipating the various logistical concerns that accompany shipping her paintings overseas for exhibition. Far more than accurate measurements, bubble wrap or “This Side Up” stickers, however, those concerns involve the mindful act of letting go. No amount of meticulous taping and reinforcement can quell the anxiety of releasing one's creations into unknown hands and unknowable hazards. After all, someone somewhere once let go of the articles of clothing she now paints.
Knowing this, Hanna Pettyjohn’s two solo exhibitions in 2015 become as much about the journey of her art as it is about her own journey. Having attained some independence from the artist through their harrowing travails, why shouldn’t the constituents of her images scatter like leaves from a tall pile, unbox themselves, and skim up to their perch on the gallery wall? By empowering the ideas and techniques that have held her interest for so long to progress by their own accord, Pettyjohn has fashioned a diaspora in oil on canvas. Reflections dislocated by their own momentum remain connected within an unseen web of when and where, by land or by air.