Arts + Literature Laboratory presents In the Vernacular: People, Places and Things, an exhibition by Hannah O'Hare Bennett on display from Friday, January 10, 2025 through Saturday, March 1, 2025.
A "First Look" for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 10, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. Note: this will be a mask-required event.
An opening reception for the new exhibitions will be held Friday, January 24, 2025 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This event will be mask-optional.
On Saturday, February 22, 2025, Bennett will give an informal artist talk at 11:00am, followed by a market from 12:00pm to 5:00pm. The market will feature work by Bennett as well as a collection of fair trade Ecuadorian artistan craft products. Represented groups will include Intag Sisal, who make bags and other pieces out of cabuya (agave) fiber. More details will be posted as the date approaches.
In the Vernacular is an exhibition of low relief, multimedia tapestries from Hannah O'Hare Bennett's People Places and Things/Gente Lugares y Cosas project exploring memory, cultural dislocation and adaptation, and love of a very specific place. Twenty years ago, the artist was a Peace Corps volunteer in a tiny village in southern Ecuador called Quillin. This exhibition is a celebration of incongruity, imperfect language, and incredible luck.
Exhibition Statement:
I make work that is in the broadest sense about human relationships to the landscape. In this current body of multimedia tapestries the “landscape” is both a specific community in a particular region of the world and the internal emotional journey of a person who has purposely chosen to be a foreigner. It is inspired by my experience two decades ago when I lived in an Ecuadorian village for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Everything was disorienting when I first arrived–the mountainous landscape, the language, some aspects of the culture; there was no choice but to adjust, learn the language, and humble myself in the face of many missteps and mistakes.
In the tapestries, recognizable images emerge in some places and are obscured in others, materially expressing the moments of understanding that emerged as I gradually integrated into the community, Quillin, Loja, population 60. By mending together disparate materials into something new and whole, I honor my memories of that time and the people who were a part of my life (and remain so now). One of the ways that my village neighbors and I built relationships was by doing manual work together, like shelling mountains of corn, making empanadas, spinning wool from the sheep. There is an echo of those repetitive, cumulative activities in many of the processes I use in my art. Ultimately, this work is about human connection to each other and to the landscape, both of which were an inescapable fact of village life.
As I have worked on this project, which I call People Places and Things/Gente Lugares y Cosas, over the last few years, it has occured to me that I am most interested in the "vernacular." In June, I returned to Ecuador for the first time in 12 years. Walking around the working class Quito neighborhood where my hotel was in those first days, I realized that the unplanned juxtaposition of materials in the houses and businesses had unconsciously crept into my current work. A few days later I was in the far south of the country, back in tiny Quillin, learning about weaving from the last two people who use a loom there. The plain wool blankets they produce come entirely from that community, and served the purpose of keeping people warm at night. They exist entirely within the economy of Quillin.
