Anna Hawkins
Love

From June 15 to August 15, 2021
Residency on Dazibao's Instagram account
@dazibaomtl

Dazibao welcomes artist Anna Hawkins for the 2021 Instagram residency and is thrilled to also present her work Blue Light Blue in early 2022.

Based in Edmonton, Hawkins will take over the Dazibao Instagram account from June 15 to August 15 with her project Love. The residency will reflect on how language is used online, exploring the many notions of a particular word. Over the course of the residency, Hawkins will form a narrative through creating images in response to posts found under #love—the most-used hashtag on the platform. Rather than sharing a body of pre-prepared images, she will provide the audience the opportunity to witness the development of the project as it happens. The images will be filtered through her as she forms a personal and responsive project that moves beyond a mere algorithmic account and connects seemingly disjointed posts together. Hawkins’ residency at Dazibao will differ from her previous work, which has used found internet sources and placed the material into a context that is removed from the web. For Love, she will be reinserting material from Instagram (along with her own footage) back into the platform, exploring the advantages of the Instagram platform while also pushing its many limitations. Dazibao will maintain a public interaction with the artist during the residency through the @dazibaomtl Instagram account in order to offer another channel of engagement for the audience. These various elements will combine to contemplate the shape-shifting nature of language on social media. In a time when online exhibitions are becoming standard and social media can be mundane, Hawkins' work will reveal how art practices can push us to more closely examine the ways we experience Instagram and the internet.

Join us on June 15th to watch the artist’s creative process happen before you on your Instagram feed!

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.