Adad Hannah Adds Third Dimension To Flat Art At Montreal’s Pierre-François Ouellette

 
Attention to our friends in the Great White North and those headed there — photographer Adad Hannah will be exhibition his work “Cuba Still (Remake)” at the Pierre-François Ouellette Contemporary Art Gallery in Montreal starting with a nice wine-and-cheese premiere tonight. In short, Hannah is a master of recreating old photographs, famous trompe l’oeil images, and chiaroscuro classics with a camera and a bit of clever set dressing.
 

For “Cuba Still (Remake)” (below), Hannah painstakingly reproduced a slice-of-life black-and-white movie still he found in Havanna’s Chinatown using a novel 3D collage technique employing large-scale cut-out prints of friends miming the original’s action then displayed on a wall using multiple projectors up to create the illusion of a single image. Equally impressive is his “Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House)” (above) which reproduces Théodore Géricault’s well-known 19th-century painting. Particularly with “Raft” the technique brings new depth and color to familiar images on top of all those lovely Post-Post-Modern conceptual appropriations that art fans flock to. It’s a turn fans of the late Derrick Jarman might remember from his film “Caravaggio”. As for “Cuba”, its exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette offers you the rare opportunity to see a digested two-dimensional image from multiple angles — a delightful step through the looking glass. Really, who needs “Avatar”?
 

 
Adad Hannah
Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
372 Ste-Catherine West #216
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
(514) 395-6032   
www,pfoc.com
For more on the artist go to www.adadhannah.com