Hans Arp: Patterns and Portraiture, 2020-2021
Beyond Portraiture
Beyond Portraiture is a series of paintings and drawings that link reality to the imaginary, while exploring what I call the “crisis of representation.” It is an attempt to create tension between varying signs of visual culture, and the layered illusions of identity and/or narratives that some of these signs create in terms of history, …
A Life to Those Shadows
A Life to Those Shadows (2015-17) was shown at SUNY-Binghamton, in the Elsie B. Rosefsky Memorial Art Gallery from March 30 – April 27, 2017, and curated by Hans Gindlesberger, Associate Professor of Photography. This is a series of real and invented portraits that critically reconstruct, and attempt to create Dutch-Indonesian ethnic personas that capture …
Get Ready to Shoot Yourself, Painting and Video installation
This installation references the ambiguity of space and time as it is depicted in the final dramatic shootout in a hall of mirrors in Orson Welles’s 1947 film, The Lady From Shanghai. The installation consists of a network of paintings, mirrored surfaces, and empty black metal frames that make direct architectural reference to a traditional …
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The Recurring Dream Panoramic Painting, 8ft high X 12ft diameter
The Recurring Dream is a large-scale panoramic painting measuring 8 ft. high, 12 ft in diameter (2.44m high X 3.66m diameter). It depicts the famous dream sequence from The Manchurian Candidate (1962); in this scene, Frank Sinatra’s character, Major Bennet Marco, is having a horrific recurring nightmare. The camera slowly pans 360º around the room, …
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The Silva Screen: Portraits of American Actor Henry Silva
As a quintessential Hollywood bad guy, Henry Silva has often been typecast as the evil “other”. Although he’s actually of Puerto Rican/Italian descent, he’s played dozens of different minorities throughout his 45 year career. In this series of portraits, Silva is depicted in a variety of roles: Mr. Moto (the Japanese crime-lord), Chunjin (the Korean …
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I’ll Be Your Mirror, Series of Oil and Acrylic Enamel Paintings
The source material of the work consists of an archive of images from personal photographs, popular culture and news media that deal specifically with the forming of collective memory of historic and current social and political events. Yet to make the paintings, I intentionally use a wet-in-wet painting process that is more prone to accident …
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Wild Horses and Western Mythology
The painting series Wild Horses is based on The Misfits (1961), which dealt with the imminent disappearance of those quintessential icons, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, “The American Cowboy” and the unblemished western frontier. In my series of paintings, the intense wild horse scene infers anti-western expansion, supposedly caused Gable a heart attack before the film …
Listen to me we’re in danger! (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was first made in 1955 and was remade in 1978. Although the original filmmakers and actors deny that there was any specific political intention, the film came to represent the collective fears surrounding the Cold War period, of Communism or, on the flipside, McCarthyism creeping into America undetected. Its remake …
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Little Triggers, Oil Paintings
The painting series Little Triggers was based on images taken from the American Cold War film classic The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film was the first political thriller made in Hollywood, the first to deal with the notion of “brainwashing” and was kept out of circulation in the United States for 25 years for its …
I’ll Be Seeing You, Video Installation, Sound Piece, Photographs, and Paintings
Memory, is an imperfect collage. By creating confusion and distance between images and the words that describe them, between the sounds, music and spaces of an experience, issues of interpretation and language not only arise but also become part of the content. The viewer is left to examine their own experiences against the everyday narratives …
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Television Series, paintings and video, 2002-2015
Like the mirror, the television is a sort of collective and distorted mirror. The television is an emissions tool that transmits ideologies, politics, and violence. Throughout the last 20 years some of the television series paintings capture an emotional state that causes viewers a sense of empathy. They also point to the psychological realism through …
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Puppet Paintings
I want to imply the existence of the “other;” the psychological and cultural familiarity is presented as strange and foreign. The choice to make portraits of the puppets is therefore based on metaphysical and symbolic weight. I am interested in the dichotomies of absence and presence, and solidity and the ephemeral. The puppets of course …