Anthony Hawley

Region: West

Every object is another thing’s ghost.

What is of great interest to me is the point at which a thing is both itself and becoming something else—the object/image wedged between itself and its ghosts. I am interested in hybridization as a social, psychological, and political tool. The process of reimagining what is understood to be concrete, static, or truthful brings me great joy. My work engages personal and cultural daydreams, fantasies, myths, desires, and disappointments to blur the boundary between reality and fiction.

The paintings here are from a large series called Rehearsal Piece. Each deals with a highly reduced and generalized sense of the face—a flattened mask or simple set of facial features disappearing beneath patterns. As a whole, the series is meant to be a kind of catalogue holding all the possible stories, all the possible selves and bodies we might perform and get shuffled through.