Tribeca, New York
Hannah Taurins
God, Let Me Be Your Instrument
ThetaTheta is proud to present Hannah Taurins’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. God, Let Me Be Your Instrument is a dual-sided prayer of desire for spiritual possession. Conventionally, it is a worshipper’s wish to surrender to divine will and serve as a tool for God’s purposes, allowing His love, guidance and work to flow through one’s life. On the B-side, it is a libidinous muttering of a fangirl at a concert: “God, if I could just be your instrument,” or the fantasy of sexual release offered by the tools of, and proximity to, a great artist. Hannah Taurins has been reading The I Ching and thinking about throwing sticks as a means of inspiration. Her studio is sort of filled with them–buckets, jars, and piles of vibrant colored pencils, which she uses to make her hybrid drawing-paintings. In the last year she has been going to concerts and listening to stories about Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, and Anita Pallenberg and plucking images out of fashion magazine archives (as she always does), to retell the story of the divine feminine in rock and roll–her own form of devotional art. Taurins works like an atemporal editor-in-chief, culling and converting fashion photos from the epochal crest of their relevance–the pre-digital content boom of the late ‘90s to mid 2000s–into ecstatic paintings that montage conventions of fame and its surrounding lust. The rockumentary, especially when filtered through the Vogue machine, rides on cliché tracks: girl at show, girl backstage, girl seduces, girl performs, star is born, star dies, girl is reborn, girl finds new gods and new earthbound escapism. Taurins indulges in the reproduction of sublime fantasy and, lest you forget who her subjects really are, explores the conventions of editorial layout as a camp framework for exploiting glamour. We, the consumers of this dazzling culture and of the rags reenacting it–can't help but buy in. Hannah Taurins (b. 1997, Houston, Texas) lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions and fairs include: Liste Art Fair Basel, Basel, CH (2024); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2023); Brant-Timonier, Palm Beach (2023); and Theta, New York (2022). Select group exhibitions include: Sister, Seoul (2024); Spazio Amanita, New York (2023); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2022); Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2022); and Entrance, New York (2022).