JILL BETH HANNES
B. 1987
https://www.jillbethhannes.com/
Describing sobriety as waking up to a different world, Jill Beth Hannes compares motherhood to this and says it carries even more uncertainty. The ambiguity that the identity of motherhood carries is passed on to us through performative social attitudes, which got Hannes thinking of a way to be able to represent this in her work. The way she does it is through video performance, writing, and mostly through photos, all of characters she creates of that facet of womanhood. That photography, nevertheless, is nearly indistinguishable from cinema. Using an eerie combination of focus, color, and a recurrent lack of faces, she wants the audience to confront the discomfort of the performance of a mother, and it’s allusive to horror films of the 70s. Most of her work is set in North Carolina, but she’s taken it well beyond, spanning L.A., NYC, and London.
