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.
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| "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.”
--
Penske McCormack
Intern, Department of Communications
