Anna Hawkins

From February 10 to April 2, 2022

The exhibition brings together two of Anna Hawkins’ video works, Blue Light Blue and Love. Together, they explore the influence of interactions between users and digital technology in daily life through experimental narratives. After completing her Dazibao Instagram residency titled Love in the summer of 2021, Hawkins offers a new video version of the project which parallels the themes of her previous work Blue Light Blue. A digital publication featuring a post-residency interview with the artist also accompanies the program.

Love (2022 — 7 min. 42 sec. ) examines the shape shifting nature of language on the internet. During the residency, Hawkins shared 30 posts combining footage found under #love, the most-used hashtag on Instagram, as well as footage she shot herself throughout the residency. This visual material was extracted and transformed into posts in real time, allowing viewers to follow along with the project’s development. Now, Hawkins brings these vignettes together to create a narrative that questions social media’s role in mediating meaning. Through interweaving disjointed and dazzling imagery that reflects both the content found under Instagram hashtags and her personal response to it, Hawkins reveals the many possible associations around a given word.

With Blue Light Blue (2021 — 15 min. 19 sec.), Hawkins considers the ways in which screens and digital worlds quietly puncture intimate spaces. In a pseudo-horror film shot partially on 16mm film, she establishes the blue light emitted from the backlit LED screens as the antagonist as it invades private and routine moments of daily life, masqueraded as mirrors or windows. Always at our side, with us in bed, or lurking nearby, this presence disrupts perceptions of place and time as it extends beyond the screen. In her use of 4K video and film, Hawkins examines the ways that image capturing devices have adapted to the shifting qualities of light, as well as how image-making and light sourcing shape perceptions of the world around us. Bedroom curtains open to a sea of digital blue and fluorescent mist pools in through cracks in doors as the light accesses even spaces of sleep, posing a threat to privacy. Day is confused with night, intimate spaces are transgressed through simulation, and even moments of rest are tainted blue.

Anna Hawkins (born in Baltimore, USA) is an artist working primarily in moving images and installations. Her works glean examples from the realms of art history, internet tutorials, fail video compilations, and horror films to examine how images create new ways of seeing and learning. Hawkins completed a BA in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh and received an MFA from Concordia University. She has recently exhibited solo projects at Centre CLARK (Montreal), The Bows (Calgary), the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (Saint-Jérôme), and the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). Her works have been shown and screened internationally at the UCLA New Wight Biennial (Los Angeles, USA), the WRO Media Art Biennale (Wroclaw, Poland), LUX (London, UK), and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at MacEwan University on Treaty 6 Territory ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, Alberta.