Hannah Spector

The desert is not a void, as it is so often depicted–it is an active landscape with vibrational subtleties that reward deep listening and looking. For half a decade, Hannah Spector has been travelling to West Texas multiple times a year to listen to this landscape. Their upcoming exhibition at Women & Their Work, if you stare at a cowboy’s face for long enough, it turns into a sunset, places queer bodies within a new mythos–one that turns against the hyperreal object of the American West as an imperial proving ground.

Featuring a multichannel sound and video installation with accompanying sequential photographs, ceramic sculpture, and copper-plate etchings, Spector projects a new future–one that disrupts gender norms, power systems within language, linear notions of time, and limiting means of self-expression.

About the Artist

Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary artist and poet working out of Austin, Texas. Spector thinks of language as a solid object—a concrete and spatial expression that can overturn limiting perceptions of the everyday.

Spector has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Stoveworks, The Museum of Human Achievement, and Pyramid Atlantic. Spector’s short films have won prizes at Dumbo Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, and Bodega Film Festival. They are an Assistant Professor of Practice of Time & Technology at UT Austin. Spector is a community organizer and curates the deep listening project, MASS Ambient. They serve as a member of MASS Gallery and are a co-curator of shedshows.