Project Room: "WRONG SIDE OF THE BORDER"

Slag Gallery is pleased to present in the project room Wrong Side of the Border, a new body of work by Hannah Cole. 

Hannah Cole's practice has long cast the spotlight on aspects of everyday surroundings that largely escape the native gaze. Cole has previously painted a glimpse of pavement, the pattern on a drainage grate, leaves of grass peeking through the crack in the sidewalk –an ode to unnoticed textures of the cityscape. The artist's preoccupations, practice, and unaffectedness thereof remain, but her surroundings have changed: Wrong Side of the Border, a series of water-color paintings of weeds, is the result of filtering Appalachia through Cole's lens. The artist has here arrived at the exemplar of an outcast: the class lacks official definition, its members not merely undesirable, but characterized by their existing on the wrong side of a highhanded border. But this first-personally grounded perspective reveals only part of Cole's dialectic; nodding in her work to such American painting forefathers as Agnes Martin, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, Cole notes: "I make every mark by hand, without shortcuts. This practice is one part meditation, one part Yankee work ethic”.

Hannah Cole's solo exhibition, The Persistence of Weeds, will be on view at Turchin Center for Visual Art July 6 through January 12, 2018.