ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is a process of reckoning. I construct spirit-filled multimedia narratives based in place, longing, and impermanence. My inspirations range from psychoanalytic theory to Kachina dancers, and the characters unleashed in the work wrestle with earthly and mystic subjects—time travel, estrangement, migration, rebirth, uncertainty, humor, agony, grief, and delight. I layer, erase, obscure, refine, and polish in dialogue with landscapes of the everyday and of memory. This piece represents a journey through these layered and multi-dimensional landscapes. Figures tumble, sail, fly, and walk through unfamiliar and fantastic territory, producing chordal allegories rooted in my meditations on attachment.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amy Hanks is a teaching artist at Mather High School in Chicago and has taught previously at the University of Michigan and Northeastern Illinois University. Amy holds a BFA from the University of Texas and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Rackham Fellow. Her work has been exhibited at Woman Made Gallery, ARC Gallery, the Devonshire Cultural Center, Jan Brandt Gallery, and Mary Bell Galleries, and she has large scale public murals installed in the Irving Park community. She has been awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the State of Illinois and a 2024 Fulbright Fellowship.
© Amy Hanks