Closing Event:
Oct 12th, 2024 2pm EST
Hannah Parrett will be in conversation with artist Mark Joshua Epstein. Their discussion will explore the roles of ornamentation, architecture, and touch in Hannah’s work. Epstein and Parrett will delve into process, materials, and techniques, and examine how the cultural and visual context of her experience living in different parts of America's Midwest influences her practice.

Main Space
Wooden Glove
Hannah Parrett
Curated by Lauren Whearty
September 14th to October 13th,  2024
Opening Reception Saturday September 14th, 5-8 pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents Hannah Parrett’s inaugural NY solo exhibit, Wooden Glove, in our main space,  curated by Co-Director Lauren Whearty.  The show opens on Saturday, September 14th, 2024.

Hannah Parrett’s sculptures and installation works explode and excavate forms of found domestic objects, while evoking architectural facades. Combining these objects with carved wood, insulation foam, and painted materials, she re-animates forms to create a visual language expressing personal narratives and mythologies. The symbolism found within Parrett’s abstractions and archetypes creates a tension between fostering an intimate relationship with a familiar interior world and the need to dissolve its boundaries. 

The reclamation and transformation of salvaged architectural elements is integral to Parrett’s process. Camp Washington, a Cincinnati neighborhood of 19th-century American homes and industrial sites, inspires themes of memory and transience in Parrett’s work. She collects discarded architectural remnants from this period, specifically pieces used for framing and decoration. Her objects include skeletons of chairs, tables, bed frames, banisters, mirrors, and mantle pieces. 

Parrett’s interest in the architecture of abandoned places stems from her experience. She grew up in Western South Dakota, surrounded by 1880s reenactment towns, where mines have become museums, and where mountains are monuments. Tourism and spectacle were strong economic pulls that became a facade for the landscape; a poster taped over a hole in the wall.

At Ortega y Gasset Projects, Parrett’s installation hugs the corner of the gallery as she creates a movie-set-like room built of found parts, and adorned with carved and painted ornamentation. Parrett uses the softness of cast paper reliefs to subvert our expectations for architecture. These forms are ephemeral points of departure from the tile work that inspires them. Parrett incorporates subtle variations in color and texture to emphasize the transient nature of the decadent histories her work evokes. The scale and familiarity of the domestic components form a constructed environment that draws on our collective memories and experiences while re-forming those familiar elements into new historical allegories.

Parrett's work transcends both painting and sculpture through her use of unconventional materials and techniques. Her works maintain the human scale and tactile essence of the found objects she incorporates into her work. Meticulous foam carvings evoke the decorative facades of Art Nouveau architecture, transforming utilitarian materials into adorned, fantastical worlds. Each process imbues the work with new meaning and narrative. These reliefs, layered with stylized organic forms, reference the past and gesture toward the cyclical nature of time and the layers of memory that accumulate over it.

Hannah Parrett is an artist and educator based out of Cincinnati, OH whose work explores the malleable boundaries of perception through expanded painting practices. Raised in South Dakota, Hannah relocated to the Midwest in 2017 and has lived there for the past seven years. During her time in central and southern Ohio, she finished her master's degree at Ohio State University where she taught as a lecturer from 2020-2022 and co-founded Dream Clinic Project Space, an artist-run gallery that operates out of a shared studio collective in Columbus, OH. She was the recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council Fellowship in 2021 and has exhibited locally and nationally at galleries that include the Pizzuti Collection through the Columbus Museum of Art, the Louise Underwood Hopkins Center for Contemporary Art, Lubbock TX, and The Neon Heater, Findlay OH. She has attended residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE,  and was the artist in residence at Visible Records in Charlottesville VA. She has an upcoming solo show at Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati in 2025. 

Her work can be seen in the Midwest Editions #155 #167 of New American Paintings.

Lauren Whearty  is a painter, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia and has been a Co-Director at OyG Projects since 2017. She has recently exhibited at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Deanna Evans Projects, Artport Kingston, Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery, and was recently commissioned to create a painting for Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mural Arts in response to “Matisse in the 1930s”. Lauren has attended Yale’s Summer School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Soaring Gardens, and Golden Foundation residencies. She has recently received grants from Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Joseph Roberts Foundation, and a Grant for Creative Research and Innovation from University of the Arts. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and BFA from Tyler School of Art.