The works on display in “a mantle of,” Hanna Pettyjohn’s new solo exhibition at Silverlens Gallery, enrich a narrative developed in prior shows – from her use of clay poured on the ground in her earliest show in 2006, “The Elaborate Nest Between Child & Breast,” to the 2015 trio of “By Land or By Air” (Silverlens, Manila), “A Web of When and Where” (Mind Set Art Center, Taipei), and “Neither Here Nor There” (Cultural Center of the Philippines for the Thirteen Artists Award), which included both paintings of and blankets imprinted with the image of cracked earth. Progressing the natural cycle of this exploration has facilitated a series of paintings and sculptures that both dismantle and reinforce what came before.

Blending familiar settings and objects, such as a tide of still life textiles below self-portraits in profile amid landscapes of waterless soil, themes expand through the use of new techniques. The works are composed in a manner of collage, with disparate elements stacked upon each other with spatial indifference. Fragments – a stitch of fabric or a strand of hair – recur throughout the images. Pettyjohn extracts snippets of images and banks them in a single digital file, where they have been accumulated, concealed, layered, obscured and rearranged in her paintings since 2013’s “Bundle.” The components of “a mantle of” were all mined from a single reference: an earlier painting that may or may not have been lost in a fire.

An imprimatura of warm raw umber coats each canvas, left exposed in large areas to stand in for both the sediment below and the air above, suggestive of a simultaneous abdication and articulation of the act of depiction. Peering through the surface of the representation reveals a prism of myriad interpretations. Within the contrast between thick layers of paint and the streaked and mottled wash of imprimatura is the balance between material and environment, memory and record, intention and realization.

In this context of mining and transparency, Pettyjohn has cast tangible shadows of the paintings. Draperies illustrated above materialize below in an installation of canvas-colored sculptures of unglazed clay. Using flattened coils to form the thin folds with her fingers, the artist copied blankets at rest (the same sheets that populate her previous paintings) to capture the lightness and softness of the source in clay fired to a hard cone 6. Viewing these opposing characteristics together, the dissonance between subject and portrayal brings both into greater focus.

One mantle lies beneath the crust, simmering in constant convection above an agitated core, while another merely shields a woman’s shoulders from any slight breeze until she returns to some warm place to leave it hanging on a wall or crumpled in a pile where it lands – perhaps the mantelpiece upon which a home tells of the lives that it contains as the vacant shell of a mollusk remains in likeness, size and shape for unknown observers to come upon – as if facets of experience, once understood by another, become an onus transferred. With “a mantle of,” Hanna Pettyjohn’s paintings and sculptures transfer meanings and relationships without limiting them to the boundaries of definition.

Text by Matt Jones

Hanna Pettyjohn (b. 1983, Manila; lives and works in Dallas) graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. The daughter of pioneering contemporary Filipino ceramicists Jon and Tessy Pettyjohn, she combines sculptural installations with paintings in her explorations of identity. Pettyjohn has exhibited in Manila, Miami, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and her work forms part of private collections in Southeast Asia.

In 2004, Pettyjohn won first prize at the 37th Shell National Students Art Competition. She received the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists Award in 2015.

A Filipino-American with a transnational narrative, Pettyjohn possesses firsthand knowledge of the global diaspora. Autobiographical details and “fragments of memory” inform her work, which is tinged with both nostalgia and an acute awareness of life’s transience. Through her large-scale portraits and personal photographs-turned-tactile landscapes, she conveys the vague anxiety, loneliness, and alienation that afflict the uprooted.