"So, you find yourself reaching for comfortable precedents: graphite, large swaths of black paint, electrical tape. As for artists, well, Barnett Newman perhaps, or Ellsworth Kelly, only, you know, a lot more metal." - Baltimore City Paper
"Decay" Reviewed in the BALTIMORE CITY PAPER
"Decay" on HUFFINGTON POST
"New American Paintings' alumni look great this month. In Chicago, one of the city's most interesting emerging artists, Dan Gunn, has new abstract work at Monique Meloche, as does Terence Hannum at Guest Spot in Baltimore and Seth Adelsberger at ltd los angeles. In New Orleans, Havana-born local legend Luis Cruz Azaceta looks good at Arthur Roger Gallery. My own gallery in Boston has been taken over by the great Franklin Evans, who is presenting new paintings in the context of a floor to ceiling installation. Former New York City dealer, and all around great guy, Jeff Bailey, has relocated to Hudson, NY, where, this month, he is presenting work by University of Iowa Professor and painters' painter, John Dilg. In the City, Sarah McEneaney continues to blow me away with her suite of hard won new paintings at Tibor de Nagy (Be sure to read Roberta Smith's review of the show in the New York Times.)" HUFFINGTON POST
Solo Exhibition: Decay @ Guest Spot (Baltimore, MD)
TERENCE HANNUM "DECAY" @ GUEST SPOT
November 15, 2015 through January 17, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday November 15, 2014 7pm-10pm
Hours: Saturdays 1-4pm & Wednesday 5-7pm or by appointment
Guest Spot at THE REINSTITUTE is proud to present Decay, a solo exhibition by Terence Hannum. Opening Friday November 15, 2014 from 7pm – 10pm, Decay will be on view through January 17, 2015. A discussion on painting and cross-practices; influences of the self-organized, will be held in conjunction with the closing on January 17, 2015, 2pm-4pm. Accompanying the exhibition will be an essay by Drew Daniel, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University and member of the experimental electronic music duo Matmos.
Decay is a natural component of the sound envelope; it is part of our understanding of sounds from an instrument, voice, or ambient source in our environment. It is also the natural state that sound media finds itself in – decaying. The record’s surface develops scratches and pops. The Library of Congress is fighting to address CD rot. Cassette tapes accumulate hiss, warble. Moving parts fail.
Terence Hannum’s new collages made from commercial cassette tape inherit the properties of paint. The physicality of cassette material adheres to a dense strata that is manipulated and peeled away, leaving behind ferric magnetic dust. It’s within this dust, in the contact between tape and tape head, that sound is captured. Hannum’s use of cassette tape acts as a parallel to current attitudes towards painting; concepts in his work regarding time, memory, and decay become fixed in a period of changing political attitudes and transformation. While the creation of magnetic tape transformed the recording process, bringing about over-dubbing, erasing and time manipulation, Hannum’s collages presents the media anew: a strata of accumulated time and sound, a decay from the mass of potentialities that once was betrothed to paint.
“Like the barren mountains of e-waste or the ship-breaking yards of Chittagong, Hannum’s studio is a place where commodities go to die. But in an alchemical act of “nigredo” in which there is a generatione ex putrefactio, the waste matter of the now-dead commodity becomes re-born as art. In a familiar allegory of the move from the baroque to modernity, the smooth clarity of abstraction is achieved through the redaction of content, the reduction of information, and the foregrounding of the material surface.”
Drew Daniel, Where Even the Darkness Is Something to See: Regarding Terence Hannum {excerpt}
Decay will also feature Hannum’s zines and handmade artist’s books, showcasing his research into cassette culture, with elements of cassette tape j-cards, slip sheets and other ephemera.
Terence Hannum is a Baltimore-based visual artist and musician who performs solo and with the avant-metal band Locrian. Hannum teaches Foundations in the Art and Visual Communication Design Department at Stevenson University. He has had solo exhibitions at Western Exhibitions (Chicago, IL), Stevenson University, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gallery 400 at UIC (Chicago, IL) and been in group shows at TSA (Brooklyn, NY), sophiajacob (Baltimore, MD), City Ice Arts (Kansas City, MO), Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans, LA) and more. He recently collaborated with artist Scott Treleaven to compose a soundtrack for the film Picture Yourself in a Burning Building that was commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival.
"Paint it Black" on Deana Haggag's 10 favorite art shows in the Baltimore Sun
"Multiple Artists, "Paint it Black, Guest Spot," Nov. 9-Jan. 4, 2014
Paint it Black was one of the most cohesive group exhibitions I've seen all year. Guest Spot curated seven artists all working with the concept of 'black'. The breadth of works included is expansive resulting in an an exhibition I think everyone should see before it closes January 4, 2014."
Enter The Void: Ian MacLean Davis Reviews Paint It Black
"Terence Hannum’s works all use magnetic audio tape as art media. This an obsolete technology. As such, the deliberate choice of this material reads as symbolic, chosen for its history as much as the way it looks and functions. Audio tape is ferrous powder bonded to narrow strips of plastic film; audio tape records sounds through the rearrangement of the iron particles into patterns by an electro-magnetic head, which also decodes those patterns back into audio. This encoding, the rearrangement of particles, is invisible to the eye. With a CDR or DVR, one can see a different pattern in how the surface of the disc reflects light. There, the unwritten portion looks different from the encoded. The tape is uniformly grey/brown and shiny. Magnetic tape is similar to a traditional hard drive; the magnetic encoding is the same. And with each, the recording of information and change to the material does not leave a visible mark or pattern." READ MORE HERE
PAINT IT BLACK
GUEST SPOT
Baltimore, MD
November 9, 2013 through January 4, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday November 9, 2013 7pm-10pm
Hours: Wednesday 5-7pm & Saturday 1pm-4pm or by appointment
Discussion Panel: Saturday January 4, 2013
Vincent Como, Ryan R Compton, Adam Farcus, Terence Hannum, Jason Lazarus, Jen Schwarting, Michael Sirianni