Often times, the paths we take in life are unexpected. Brooklyn based artist Hanna Jaeun first studied apparel design and it wasn’t until she spent two years in a corporate job that she realized it wasn’t the life she wanted. She decided to start over, picked up a paint brush and taught herself how to paint. Over time her art ventured into a dark place where hybrid figures and animals journey into the unknown, similar to the uncertain path Jaeun chose for herself. “The people in my paintings are either physically part-animal or longing to be animal… My animals bring to life my desire to tell a story,” she says.
Featured here, Jaeun likens her paintings to a broken fairytale, taking inspiration from the darker Disney classics like Snow White and Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal, as well as a love of animals, seeking to recreate that feeling of entering another world. “I like to work with themes in the afterlife of humans and the beauty of the cycle of life and death of animals. Surrealism to me is a dreamlike state or subconscious,” she explains. Her newest body of work focuses on the theme of living beyond the time where you were expected to die, and the journey one must take to “the other side”.
Titled “On Borrowed Time,” Jaeun’s show at Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia features new acrylic paintings that “reveal a beautiful yet sorrowful face of the journey,” depicting a collection of human and animals in a state of transcendence. Shrouded grim-reapers overlook little girls and dead birds who lay to rest, while beasts like bears and wild cats linger like apparitions in the night sky. Jeaun notes that she didn’t want to make the sight of death too obvious, pointing more to our connection to nature, where all creatures live, die and are reborn in one form or another: “in the end we are all, whether human or animal, here on earth for only a short period of time.”
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