Collage/Chaos:
On the Process of Hana Hillerova
- Charissa N. Terranova -
Austin-based Hanna Hillerova works through two fields of action that double overthe event and the performative object on one hand and the happening and flat representation on the other. Differences in formfrom event to objectbelie a shared ethic: a hybridized world-view rooted in an aesthetic of collage informed by chaos theory. Collage and chaos are things, yet Hillerova deploys them as if they are verbs. No mere condition, each piece becomes the catalytic trigger of an event. At other times, Hillerova's work feels performative, like the words of J.L. Austin's speech-acts. They are biomorphic objects that breathe and pose promise.
In keeping with traditional notions of collage, Hillerova's process is a matter of creating discordant adjacencies. She brings together varying, even cacophonous materials, such as painted and unpainted cardboard, digital prints mounted on aluminum, plastic boards and bits and pieces of detritus. Collage then gives way to photography. Hillerova digitally distills the static objectshoots it and manipulates it on the computer. In a cycle of ever-diminishing decline, the real gives way to the simulacrum as Hillerova transforms three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images.
In installing Swarm, we first see fusionsticks, cardboard and small sheaths of digital prints that clutter the floor like bits of food. Hillerova then mounts her distended and jolted images onto plastic or aluminumincorporating them and other swirls of material into a remix, to use a musical term. In doing so, she keeps her objects alive: they are always in the process of becoming something other than themselves.
To collage is to cut. It is an operation and a critique. Criticism and collage are intimately related by way of both process and etymology. [The verb critique means to judge, which comes from the Greek krinein, meaning to separate, divide or cut.] To cut and suture paper as Hillerova does communicates a message of collapse and renewal through a clever play of allegory and abstraction. She strikes elegant formalism by way of translating chaos theory into process.