Jody Hanson

Jody Hanson is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to her artist interview. 

Jody Hanson is a local artist in Buffalo, New York. She received her BFA from Indiana University and her MFA from the University of Illinois, and moved to Western New York in 2007. Hanson has been an art installer, framer, and mount maker for the past 22 years, and has been working for museums, artists, and collectors, handling antiquities and contemporary art. A former art preparatory at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Hanson utilizes salt as a medium in her graceful and meditative paintings, inspired by circular mandala paintings common in eastern religions. Hanson has developed a technique for her artwork, which involves dissolving salt in various ratios of water and applying it to paper, which then absorbs the solution and allows for crystals to grow. Her pieces are inspired by the circular mandala paintings. While forecasting a sense of tranquility, up close they apparent peace is complicated by the jagged nature of crystal formations.

In the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University, several new works by Hanson went on view in her solo exhibition “Jody Hanson: Imperfect”. The series of these solo exhibitions for regional artists was sponsored by Tops Friendly Markets. This exhibition is described to represent a period of her life when she thought about the meaning of perfection. “I think of myself as a ‘reformed perfectionist.’ While my works are formal in design and format, these works allow for natural variations due to the choice of medium and the handmade quality of the work,” she says.

“I’m still figuring the materials out, learning what is possible and how to try to achieve certain effects. Working with different papers and boards yields completely different results and I am so often surprised at what happens. For the recent work, I have been working primarily at night because that is a quiet time. The first thing I do when I get up the following morning is see what transpired overnight!” [1]

[1] Castellani Art Museum Opens New TopSpin Exhibition, “Jody Hanson: Imperfect” NU News http://news.niagara.edu/castellani-art-museum-opens-new-topspin-exhibition-jody-hanson-imperfect/