Seán Hannan

Seán Hannan is a Conceptual artist exploring different ways of visual storytelling within the history of art.

The work Manifest Destiny, that is printed on our June membership card, is a folded dollar bill that ends up spelling ‘GO WEST’. The artist only makes it under the condition it is kept by the receiver in their wallet, for good luck. So by keeping this membership card close this month, perhaps every Subbacultcha member has a little more luck than usual… 🙂

The image on the poster, 240p, is a conceptual appropriation of the work The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge, in which Hannan superimposed tumbling riders and falling horses on Muybridge’s iconic imagery.

The image was made for an exhibition called The Stuff of Legend, a project revolving around storytelling, mythology and folklore and the role these play in contemporary society. The digital and analogue world met in the exhibition, where at the centre, an early 20^th century phonograph dispersed stories throughout the exhibition space, referring to the earliest techniques of sound recording.

240p stands for ‘240 Progressive’, an early (low) quality internet videostream that creates a big videopixel in the images. Also known from the popular internet-meme on Youtube, ‘240p, we meet again’.

The reason Hannan chose to appropriate Muybridge’s Horse in Motion is because this particular image, and the technique used, is known within art history as a precursor for what eventually became film. By putting together photographs taken in a fast procession by using multiple photo cameras alongside a racetrack, Muybridge was able to primitively capture motion. The work of the title hereby refers to the similar rudimentary character of early internet video streams.

We see the famous Muybridge photographs of the running horse, which Hannan superimposed with found images from the internet, to create a new image of motion. A different timeline presents the horse jumping out of the frame, riders falling to the ground, rolling around and getting back on the horse, literally. The last frame is the same as the first, representing an endless loop of falling and getting back up again.