HANNAH TAURINS Issues

Hannah Taurins (b. 1997, Houston, TX) draws and paints extant photographs in watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and marker. Her liberal reworking of preconfigured scenes addresses the processes in which images are transmitted between varying technological and mental states, accentuating the interdependent matrix of exchange that binds images to their viewers. Issues—nomenclature for periodicals—draws from a personal assemblage of fashion photography. Taurins’s work collapses the temporal context of these sources by analogizing studio practice with editorial and archival activity. Initially sketching at scale, Taurins retains select elements of her source image while dramatically refashioning others. Fabrics, patterns, and shafts of light are made to be pliable––a haptic configuring that calls to the handling and processing of analogue photography. This emphasis of augmentative handiwork motivates the subjects of Taurins’s work towards their logical conclusions as specters and conjurings of the mind. Like the printed images she cites, Taurins’s compositions are assembled in an additive manner. Highlights reveal themselves as punctuations of unblemished paper; overlapping hashes are smelt into inventive chromogenic space; and the quasi-Gaussian blur of form insinuates aberrations synonymous with lens work and photochemical processes. Taurins’s adroit handling of drafting material stands in for the attentive and precise nature of her subjects––models staged rigorously in order to suggest a naturalism and ease. Issues draws from a period of cultural activity in which the currency of desire was honed in editorial photography and printed media. Functioning as both covert and overt advertisement, these images fashioned a certain sensual-scarcity whilst personifying the abstracted sphere of commerce. Taurins’s work reinvigorates the operations endemic to this media, playing with the paradoxical relations established by editorial photography between the material and the auratic. This triangulation between visual matter, its phenomenological runoff, and the production of desire belong both to the fashion industry that Taurins plucks her source images from, as well as the art industry in which her newly-formed materials circulate.