An exhibition in response to COVID-19
"I’m drawn to images of childhood or child-like ways of making images. A lot of my work is about nostalgia and how we look back at and remember or misremember things. I like to work in marker or colored pencil—materials that have a lot of immediacy."
Oasis (2020)
18" x 24"
Colored Pencil, gouache, and marker on paper
Hannah Antalek
At first glance, Hannah Antalek’s use of markers and colored pencils seem child-like and playful. Her depictions of animals and plants are saturated with nostalgia and childhood memories and she uses dreamscapes to blur memory, imagination, and myth.
Antalek also looks towards literary and biblical sources for inspiration. In her world, a stampede of horses can represent fond memories of a childhood obsession to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as in the work Oasis.
The forest’s edge is curtained in darkness, suggesting the potential for everything, nothing, and anything beyond the illumination of the scene. It is a psychological space of the pandemic's inertia contrasted against political and cultural upheaval.
Wishing Well is inspired by Dante's Inferno as well as referencing a giant pit that opens in the Book of Revelation. In that story, locusts fly out of the ground. Antalek chooses moths instead, a symbol of transformation and hope.
Wishing Well (2020)
34" x 48"
Colored Pencil, gouache, and marker on paper