Video: All the fuss and trinkets: a vanitas installation by Adad Hanna
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The 40-year-old author of the installation “Everything is Vanity (Version Without a Mirror)”, Adad Hannah, decided to remind art connoisseurs of a work of more than a century ago. Back in 1892, the young American Charles Alan Gilbert created an optical illusion about the vanity of female beauty. His painting depicted a lady admiring her own reflection in the mirror. But the irony was that the whole picture made up a skull - the central image of works in the genre of vanitas (translated from Latin as "vanity").
The young American Charles Alan Gilbert, who lived a century ago, became a venerable illustrator when he matured. But all the same, he is most often remembered precisely in connection with his early ironic work in the vanitas genre. The idea of the painting, which the artist painted while still an eighteen-year-old student, is simple and witty. It is based on a pun. The point is that in English vanity is both "vanity" and "trinkets" and "dressing table". Therefore, the title of the work "All Is Vanity" can be translated as "All the vanity", and as "All the trinkets from the dressing table."
The artist's pun, of course, was not exhausted only on one verbal level alone. Charles Alan Gilbert's painting also doubles. Who is in front of us: a blooming young woman or a grinning Yorick? Both. After all, the mirror is the vault of the skull, the lady's head and her reflection are empty eye sockets, the bottles on the toilet are teeth, and the napkin hanging from the table is the lower jaw.
Charles Alan Gilbert's witty visual pun haunted our contemporary - Adad Hannah, a resident of Montreal (Canada). Since now not only the art of destroying paintings is in demand, but also the ability to give them new life, he decided to arrange an installation in the genre of vanitas. Adad Hanna undertook to create a living picture - almost an exact copy of the work of his eminent predecessor. But without a mirror. Instead, an empty wooden frame is placed on the dressing table.
The author of either a frozen performance or a living installation invited the twin sisters to the roles of a blooming lady and her reflection. They practically do not move, and only the fact that the models periodically blink out of order reveals the secret of the boudoir scene, invented over a hundred years ago and given flesh thanks to the project of Adad Hannah.
The volumetric modern remake of the 1892 optical illusion is a second-order illusion. But the creation of Adad Hannah is no longer so clearly twofold: his installation is, first of all, a beautiful woman, and only then (and with some stretch) a skull. The fact is that, firstly, the image of Gilbert is fixed at the optimal angle - you can look at Hanna's installation from any point, but you will have to independently look for the most suitable position for perception a la “two in one”. Second, unlike Gilbert's black and white palette, the colors in Hannah's project break the illusion and destroy the visual pun. However, judge for yourself.
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