Hannah Israel

Education and Certifications

• BFA - Indiana University of Pennsylvania
  
• MFA - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Biography

Hannah Israel is the Gallery Director of the Illges Gallery and a Professor of Art in the Department of Art. Ms. Israel received her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her Bachelors Degree in Art History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Prior to moving here, Ms. Israel worked at The International Studio and Curatorial Program and James Cohan Gallery in New York City. She has curated several group exhibitions, exhibited her own work nationally and worked on collaborative projects with other artists. Hannah Israel received The Elizabeth Art Foundation Studio Arts Grant, The Daedalus Art Foundation Grant, and The Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship.

Her work is across various interests including sculpture, installation, video, and mark making. Israel has exhibited her work at the High Museum of Art, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Simmon Art Center at Bernau University, The Vargas Museum of Art in the Philippines, Museum of Contemporary Art in Honolulu, I-Space in Chicago, the Krannert Art Museum, among others.

She has also curated numerous solo and group exhibitions including Methodologies, at the Madelon Arts Gallery, East Stroudsburg University, PA, Beyond the Grid Into the Sublime for the Illges Gallery Columbus State University, Magnetic Landscape at the Columbus Museum, and You Me Us and Them at the W.C. Bradley Co. Museum, GA. Her works are collected in museums and private collection.

Artist Statement

Hannah Israel reflects on information as a form of abstraction. The nature of her work maps the relationships of our existence by illustrating how fragile time can be and how predictable our experiences can be based on the temperament of the world around us.

Israel draws beauty out of tangible and intangible materials, reflecting the fragility of the world in her poetic works. Without a specific reference point, her investigations uses line, volume, texture, shape, and form that imbue a sense of intuition and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. Influenced by process art, she creates works that resemble subsets of sorting, shifting, ephemera, gathering, tearing, cutting, and patterning. She is interested in how process can create a new meaning.

Imagined language is in the root of Israel's work. She is fascinated by cultures who uses the same symbols and patterns to create maps of both their land and their dreams. This lack of distinction between fantasy and reality opens up the way we can think about our world. This paradigm creates a world of physical impossibilities and questions our presence in time and space. Israel is interested in the ambiguous state in which one can exist neither here nor there, a space in between worlds.