Greene Contemporary is pleased to present new work by Hannah Cole in Instant Sublime, opening Wednesday July 1 and continuing through Sunday August 2, 2009. This is Hannah’s first solo exhibition with Greene Contemporary.

Hannah Cole’s work explores the distracted American state of mind. In Instant Sublime, she investigates the disconnect between an individual’s physical presence and emotional state during a single instant in time. In the chaos of urban life, driving is one of the few remaining acts of ritual and solitude. Drawing from personal experience, Cole uses different views from inside a car as a metaphor for the relationship between interior life and the world outside.

The shaped paintings are a tug of war between slow and fast pace, the mundane and the profound, and between distraction and presence. To the driver, the windshield is a screen where one watches the world pass in front of them. Inside the bubble, fleeting thoughts are triggered by visual cues from the roadside, or they unfold from interior recitations of route numbers and shopping lists. Though driving is a rare refuge of privacy and personal freedom, being “in the moment” is perpetually complicated. The car, like the mind, is always moving.

Instant Sublime is populated with double images. Four shaped oil paintings on panel present different moments in daily life, framed by the surprising shape of a car window or passenger. The speed of the imagery contrasts with the laboriously handmade paintings. Each panel is carved and sanded by hand in the artists studio, without the use of fabricators or studio assistants. Accompanying the paintings is a group of sixteen archival inkjet photographs, each punctured by pinpricks forming the delicate outline of handwritten reminders.

Hannah Cole paints from everyday life, but in that process transforms the common into the exceptional. The paintings and pinprick photographic work collaborate to engage the viewer in a process of recall – memories of the past and reminders of things to do. With striking detail, Cole transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Hannah Cole was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1978. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from Boston University. She has had solo exhibitions in Venice, Italy and Boston, Massachusetts. She was recently featured in New American Paintings #80, Northeast Competition. Hannah would like to thank the Ucross Foundation for their generous support, and the late Poet Laureate Mona Van Duyn for her gift. Hannah lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.