Hannah Cole

Time’s Wife
For New York City-based artist Hannah Cole, inspiration is found in the overlooked subjects and fragments of everyday experience. The exhibition title, Time’s Wife, taken from US poet laureate Mona Van Duyn’s poem Caring for Surfaces, provides insight into Cole’s creative impetus and meticulous approach to painting. The artist surveys her environment for subjects—defaced manhole covers, metal doors scarred with paint marks and tape residue, and the textured surfaces below our feet. She painstakingly paints these pieces of urban existence, along with items of domestic life and varied objects observed in the studio and, in doing so, imbues the mundane objects with new meaning. Cole states, “A cement sidewalk becomes a window, for example, and a man-hole cover becomes a mandala.” Through her carefully framed and virtually hyper-realist depictions, she accentuates the geometric abstraction, rhythmic repetition and textural qualities of these observed surfaces.