Title

Growth Rings

Artist

Hannah, Adad

Date

2020

Medium

glass

acrylic

Type

digital media

Owner

Polygon

Accession Number

NA

Location

Vittorio - 6579 Marlborough Ave., Burnaby

Category

Private Development Public Art

Collection

Public Art

Lat/Long

49.222512,-122.992674

View in Google Maps

http://www.google.com/maps?q=49.222512,-122.992674

The artist's concept proposal states: “Burnaby was a forest not too long ago, and Douglas firs were everywhere alongside ancient Hemlock, Cedar, and Spruce. The Coastal Douglas fir can live for up to 1,000 years, far beyond the age of this young city or the scale of a human life. A cross section of a tree allows us to zoom out on time and see the years as seasonal cycles affected by natural and human-made events. Each year a tree forms new cells, beginning in the spring with light-coloured earlywood and into the summer with a darker wall of latewood. Environmental conditions are recorded by the tree like a history ledger; for example, a drought produces a thinner ring and a fire produces a scar. Once the tree is cut down it reveals this internal history, exposing a record of its life and the life surrounding it.”

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980’s. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Adad Hannah explores historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s overall practice invokes the durational form of early cinema, while also making reference to early photography by mimicking paintings at a time when it was the very goal of photography to do so. Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. He has exhibited widely, including at the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (2008), the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2008), the Zendai MoMA, Shanghai (2009), the Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai 2008), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2007), the National Gallery of Canada (2011, 2006). In 2004 he won the installation/new media award at the Toronto Images Festival and the Bogdanka Poznanovic award at Videomedeja 8. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai), the art gallery Nationale Zacheta (Warsaw), Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada.