MACKENNA HANSON IS AN ARTIST, WRITER, AND STUDENT BASED IN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. 

MacKenna Hanson is a Chicago-based artist currently on track to receive her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2025 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in 2003 in Jacksonville, Florida, she's lived in Georgia, North Carolina, and Stockholm, Sweden. Hanson uses her art to delve deep into contradictions of identity, taste, materiality, and culture. She's a triplet sister, a pop culture enthusiast, and an enjoyer of fun.

Hanson was assigned to SAIC's 2023 Dean's List for Outstanding Sophomores and recently admitted into the School's 2024-2025 Advanced Painting Program. As founder of the artist collective Salon des Refusés, she works closely with friend and fellow artist Katharine Oltrogge. 

Hanson has won two Honorable Mentions from the Scholastic Art Awards and an Honorable Mention from the United States Congressional Art Competition. She also received sizable merit scholarships from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Maine College of Art, Cornish College of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was granted entry into SAIC's Art Bash of 2022 and had two of her works exhibited in the LeRoy Neiman Center.

Her work is currently represented by Formato Fine Arts in Wytheville, VA and 310 Art in Asheville, NC; and held in several private collections.

ARTIST STATEMENT 

Questions of taste, reproduction, and the meaning of surface—both as a material tool and a metaphorical concept—arise in my work. How the human operates as reproductive labor is a central issue in my works. To reproduce appropriated imagery onto a surface, with precision but not robotic exactitude, is a transformative process which combines both craft and concept. Little mysteries in my works (such as a stray brushstroke, fingerprint, or other mark of humanity) leave behind a trail of evidence of the creative process. When the appropriated images are combined with imagined or incidental marks, I question the meaning of originality and its valuation.

My paintings combine the history of painting with the present moment through the violent collision of imagery, both appropriated and imagined. The ambiguity of the image’s origins and the tension between subjects on the picture plane forces the audience to consider what it means when these symbols share space. By utilizing multiple visual languages in unconventional mediums, such as illustrative pop-culture imagery portrayed in oil paint, I complicate the meaning of mimicry, class, and artistic hierarchy. I activate how the figure is filtered and changed through such institutions. 

My drawings investigate the history of comics and their traditional use as an accessible narrative tool. Using the comic board as a point of entry, I explode the medium through various means: flipping the comic board on its side from the traditional portrait composition, ignoring pre-printed bleed lines and publishing regulations, and dissolving the use of the panel as a storytelling device. My illustrations complicate my paintings as my paintings complicate my drawings; both traditionally separated mediums inevitably bleeding into the other and structuring my unique visual language in which conversations of gender, capitalism, figuration, and storytelling can be had.

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