“Veils is about the subculture of heavy metal music and the choreography of the headbang,” says Hannum, who is Assistant Professor of Art at Stevenson and moved from Chicago to Baltimore in 2011. “I am interested in how marginal subcultures, such as those in extreme heavy metal, remove themselves and generate their own mythologies and meanings. For example hair is a code and symbol in many societies and cults. Hair is an uncontrollable substance, something formless, beautiful, and terrifying. My gouache heads are anonymous—you never see their faces or those other members in the crowd. But while their identities are obscured, their hair becomes their primal manifestation.”
In addition to gouache drawings, the exhibition includes mirrors, Hannum explains. “Mirrors are key elements in our superstitions around death, by being covered or avoided during a time of mourning. Or even in urban myths about being in a dark room with a mirror and chanting someone’s name. I hope to catch a viewer off guard by finding themselves in a drawing or seeing a drawing where there was none. My desire is that these heads of hair remove themselves from their subculture and become like wraiths reflected into a void with the audience.”
Hannum has exhibited solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Invisible NYC in New York City and has also participated in group exhibitions across in Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, and Bergen, Norway. He performs music solo and with the band Locrian, and his zines and publications are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, and DePaul University.
For more information or to receive Art Effects, Stevenson’s biannual calendar of arts and cultural events, contact Diane DiSalvo, Director of Cultural Programs, at 443-334-2163 or e-mail: ddisalvo@stevenson.edu.
Image: “Empyrean” by Terence Hannum (Gouache on paper, 2012)
Stevenson’s Greenspring campus is located at 1525 Greenspring Valley Road, Stevenson, MD 21153. The Stevenson Gallery (link) is open to the public Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturdays, 1-4 p.m.
