Thursday, September 20, 2018

Student Spotlight: Neil Hancock


Each semester, the Georgia Museum of Art has student interns from departments and units across campus. Penske McCormack is currently an intern for the department of communications and a student at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. In the essay below, they examine and interpret the work of another Lamar Dodd student, Neil Hancock.

"Large, But Not Biggest"
By his own insistence, Neil Hancock’s paintings are guarded by code. Meaning and narrative embroiled within a foreign alphabet, each visual element is a Gordian knot of misinterpretation, to the point that we, the viewers, are forced to release our compulsion to comprehend. It is only with such release that these paintings are able to be effectively experienced. Hancock’s self-portrait as a raccoon serves as an excellent example, using the question “why?” as a weapon against trespass. We are confronted by symbols and objects that, according to our own logic, must hold translatable meaning: a dead raccoon, surrounded by an aura of vibrating white; a rectangle layered over the animal and painted with wood grain; digital prints of oranges and a table full of beer and cigarettes; and road lines of exaggerated perspective, which disappear with blotched strokes that ground the painting as a painting, not an illusion. Why include these elements? What are their logic and their purpose, if we are not given tools to excavate their significance? This art historian would argue that it is to the end of redemption, even democratization, of autobiography that the artist performs such futile semiotics.

Although we are presented with symbolic elements very consciously chosen and executed on the part of the artist, and the painting therefore reeks of personal significance — the title, “Game Knows Game,” exemplifies such — the fact that the symbols are not explained means that we are free to experience the narrative as an object. Rather than being bound to the artist’s experiences and point of view, we are able to adjust our mental grip to our own comfort. Like the consumption of food versus the preparation of it, we are sensing the self-portrait rather than understanding it.

Hancock’s paintings also perform alchemy in the transformation of sensation and experience into an object. As can only be effectively seen in person, the canvases are thick, the sides painted to encase them fully in the artist’s will. “Camo Object” highlights this prioritization of a painting’s reality rather than its realism. “Ill Dome” performs the same transformation, with the added layer of a perfectly comprehensible and relatable phrase, “Shut Up Brain,” manifesting in reality along with the painting. The frustration of overthinking is made feasible, something we could grip in our hands, turn over and over, even throw against the wall. This potentiality creates a sense of wonder regarding a sensation that would otherwise be somewhat sinister, yet fully castrated by its mundaneness.

“Horrible People,” a collaboration with Athens artist Annemarie DiCamillo, takes this transfiguration and magnifies it through vehemence. The graphic flames amplify the phrase and raze the viewer’s perception in a straightforward sense, but scribbled paint strokes, tone-shifting emotive letters, and drips of paint both precise and messy communicate the sensation even more effectively. We do not know of whom the artist is speaking, or what situation brought about the frustration — for certainly it was a condensed moment, implied by the phrase’s hasty scrawl — but the necessity of such knowledge has been done away with. An explosive sensation is reinterpreted through intentionality and allows us to reconsider with it with impunity--the experience of aggravation without the cause or consequence.

“Large, But Not the Biggest” (above), includes all these factors. It is a painting of tenderness, and of an important story we can feel but not iterate. By withholding information, the narrative becomes almost universalized. Hancock’s painting is a practice in labor and ease, immediacy and distance, as is best described by the statement on the artist’s website:

“He uses abstraction as a means of generalization, reexamining and categorizing experience into painting surface and object. Experience becomes truth. Ambiguity is important. The code cannot be broken. Defend the castle.”

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Penske McCormack
Intern, Department of Communications




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