April 24 to June 8, 2014

Koffler Gallery

Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street

Curator: Mona Filip

A Featured Exhibition in the 2014 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

PUBLIC OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, April 24, 2014 | 6 – 9 PM | FREE

Vancouver-based artist Adad Hannah has earned an international reputation for his video-recorded tableaux vivants that often reference art history and paradigms of museum practices. Staging models to hold poses for an extended time, he deconstructs the photographic image, drawing attention to the inherent performance and production of meaning.

In this new body of work, Hannah shifts focus to his personal history, re-animating a “frozen moment” captured eighteen years before he was born. His starting point is a yellowing photograph of his grandmother painting a portrait of his mother at an art club on an American military base in Kodiak, Alaska in 1953. Hannah works in dialogue with his mother, the subject of the original photograph and an artist herself, collaborating to expand the moment under observation through a complex video and still installation. Integrating a mock-up of the studio setting in the original photograph and other findings from the family archive, Hannah breathes new life into the found image. Positioning for the first time a family member as collaborator rather than as subject or model, Hannah pushes his practice deeper than ever into the exploration of the most popular genre of photography – the family snapshot.