Karina Hean Exhibit, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

KARINA HEAN

Artist Statement

Environment forms and transforms us, marking our bodies, relationships, thoughts, habits, motion, and speech. The drawings respond to the quality and character of place both as a mirror and as a limitation as they investigate the impact of landscape.

As a record of instance and interaction, the drawings act as portraits of the human condition; perhaps currently all serve as self-portraits that lend witness to the hybrid landscape of my travels, various homes, and consequently identity. These sites of gathering form a reconstruction of self as reflected in specifically chosen aspects of the landscape.

Among the series of drawings and within a single drawing, description ranges from sensitive caring line to aggressive mark, opacity to transparency, and flat shape to volumetric form; unavoidably perhaps I yearn to see this range of experience as present in the work as in life.

Drawing Series Notes

“Landscaped” consists of a series of drawings that reflect upon the built quality and ephemeral state of landscape and investigates the notion of landscape as structured, manipulated, bought, sold, perched, preserved, imagined, frail, and bounded.

Drawings in the “Limits” series present defining encounters with the physical edges of coastlines, mountains, ridges, and canyons. Often, these boundary sites become places of repeated pilgrimage and offer an amplified sense of place and purpose in their ability to reveal the body’s scale and limitations.

The “Field Notes” drawings define an imagined landscape made possible by one body’s experience of various places; they serve as a gathering place of currently pertinent imagery. This meta-landscape derives from a pleasing duality of being reliant upon empirical experience and at the same time existing beyond phenomena.