With By Land or By Air, Silverlens Galleries presents Thirteen Artists Award winner Hanna Pettyjohn’s first show of 2015. The 36 paintings comprise a work about the passage of time as well as all other passages; a migratory mentality known to all who live away from home.

As the perpetual traveller is wont to learn, lightness is not only more efficient; it is often essential. At 12” x 16”, these paintings are distinctly smaller than any Pettyjohn has created since the concise and arid landscapes of 2011’s Few and Far Between, which conveyed a sense of isolation while driving through the western United States. Some sparseness remains in the white backdrop of these new works, thick and stippled, interrupted by dripping earthen tones that run down and off the edge of the canvas, stretching into the unseen.


Thus framed by light and dark, cloud and mud, wet earth against brittle sky, many of the subjects for this series of paintings are the self-same swaths of cloth seen in works from previous shows such as 2013’s Bundle, The Glass Between Us, and Witherland. In those shows, Pettyjohn experimented with and expanded her vocabulary of images and textures, exposing them to varying characteristics of light, focus and environment. In the first two shows, Bundle and The Glass Between Us, the same textile materials were portrayed in both portrait and still life formats allowing the exploration of conditions such as warmth and cold, interior and exterior, fabric and flesh. Concluding with Witherland, Pettyjohn discarded these distinctions by combining the contrasting elements through manipulation. Here, the fragments have now been abstracted from any context of setting or collage, achieving an effect somewhere between singular focus and compartmentalization.

Like flotsam adrift, each painting refers to an absent whole. Visual components of larger paintings similar to those in the upcoming show A Web of When and Where in Taipei have been plucked and arranged into isolated formations. Assembled in four groups of nine, all of the paintings share the title Unearthed appended by a signifier pointing towards a reference. Eighteen of the 36 paintings (Unearthed A 1-9 and Unearthed C 1-9) reference works of the same name (Unearthed A from Art Basel Hong Kong 2014 and Unearthed C from Art Taipei 2014). The remainder (Unearthed MTJ 1-9 and Unearthed MNL 1-9) reference multiple sources including Unbundled A (The Glass Between Us), HP II (Bundle), Witherlands(Christie’s), HP MNL (Art Fair Philippines 2014), and Unearthed I (upcoming). In all of them, folds and tufts of stripes and shadows tell a story of relations looking both forward and behind.


Staged in a row, this catalogue of visual echoes portends an assessment of surrogate manifestations, further complemented by an installation of wooden crates and lids positioned below each painting. Dried splatters of clay connect the two pieces tentatively between floor and wall, just as the crates themselves connect this show to 2010’s Year of Glad.  That previous show consisted of four paintings depicting the people and places that made up Pettyjohn’s own family history through images taken from aerial maps and old photographs. The four chambers that were constructed  to house those paintings were filled alternately with wooden crates or arrows in stacked or scattered arrangements.

Presented together, the crates, paintings and streaks of clay in this present show form an apt representation of Hanna Pettyjohn’s evolving artistic process.  Splitting her time between Manila and Texas, the act of packing and unpacking has become second nature to her. In recent years she has produced her paintings primarily in America and become adept at anticipating the various logistical concerns that accompany shipping her paintings overseas for exhibition. Far more than accurate measurements, bubble wrap or “This Side Up” stickers, however, those concerns involve the mindful act of letting go. No amount of meticulous taping and reinforcement can quell the anxiety of releasing one's creations into unknown hands and unknowable hazards.

Knowing this, By Land or By Air becomes as much about the journey of Pettyjohn’s art as it is about her own journey. Having attained some independence from the artist through their harrowing travails, why shouldn’t the constituents of her images scatter like leaves from a tall pile, unbox themselves, and skim up to their perch on the gallery wall? Continuing the process of deconstruction and reconstruction that has informed so much of her past work, Hanna Pettyjohn has fashioned a diaspora in oil on canvas. Reflections dislocated by their own momentum remain connected, by land or by air.