Hannah Smith Allen’s photography exhibition “Beyond Walls” opened on Tuesday, March 11 with a lecture and opening reception in Johnson Memorial Building. The exhibition — which will run until April 5 — includes works made during President Donald Trump’s first term as a method of interpreting, interrupting and engaging with America’s landscapes and its complex political systems.
Allen is a photographer and associate professor of Art and Art History at Adelphi University. She believes the power of art lies in depicting what is going on in the world and providing commentary on it.
“The world is something to notice, to celebrate, to comment on, and to criticize. It is not stagnant,” Allen’s biography from Adelphi states.
During her talk, which was sponsored by the Studio Art Department, Allen discussed how her undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design informed her understanding of the role of photography today. In college, she said she was taught that “artists make art because they have something to say,” which did not resonate with her.
Instead, Allen learned to create less intentional work when attending the School of Visual Arts for graduate school. She began thinking about how people respond to events with photography and how information is relayed, sparking her ongoing interest in how places have been politicized and militarized.
In the Johnson Gallery are selected photographs from two past projects, “Borderlands” and “Battlegrounds,” as well as three new pieces: a video installation titled “Dream States (U.S./MX),” a panorama image of the U.S. southern borderlands that spans over two lightboxes and a projection piece titled “Paper Ghosts” that showcases historic war objects projected onto recent articles from the New York Times.
“Together, the works in Beyond Walls resist a single, narrative reading. Instead, these works offer viewers different visions of sites of conflict,” Allen wrote in an email to The Campus.
“Borderlands” documents both the virtual and physical U.S.-Mexico border. After the 2016 presidential election, Allen noticed that the viewer can slip in and out of the wall on Google Maps’ street view, a perfect symbol of the malleable and mythical qualities of the border history of the U.S. Following this discovery, Allen travelled in-person to the U.S. southern border to photograph the landscape herself. “Dream States,” the stop-motion video, reveals moments on Google when the wall breaks down and the camera moves between the two countries.
The other works take a more introspective, reflective tone. In “Target Practice,” viewers see their own reflection in the military targets that Allen fabricated from acrylic mirrors. In “Paper Ghosts,” shadowy visions from past wars haunt contemporary news stories, pieces that many community members might remember reading themselves in the past year.
The multimedia and sometimes abstract qualities of all the exhibition’s components allow the viewer to engage with the works at their own pace and order. There was no sense of ‘here’ and ‘there’ in her work — the representations of borders are fluid through the video work as well as the silk screening on her photographs that turn the work from a single photograph to a more abstract multimedia piece. Silk screening uses a mesh screen, stencil and ink to transfer an image onto a surface, creating bold and layered final products. Walking through the gallery, I felt that Allen sought to produce work stemming from a multitude of responses to our ongoing political crises regarding immigration and the borders.
“I don't think art — at least my art — is supposed to provide answers, especially to some of these big geo-political questions. And I certainly do not want to minimize the complexity of these situations,” Allen wrote. She added that her goal is to spark conversations and introspection among the students and community who visit her installation this month.
“Instead, my hope is that people walk away from the exhibition thinking more deeply about conflict, land, and politics and how all these subjects have been conventionally depicted. If my art can get people to talk, debate and think, it is working,” she added.
