A Living Colour Index
Over the course of the next seven weeks, the interior of artist Michael Hanna’s home will be lit entirely with a different colour each week, moving through the colour spectrum from red to violet, with each week providing a new sensory living environment within the same space.
The project entitled 'A Living Colour Index' is a response to the shifts in time and memory experienced in lockdown with days and weeks blending together. Investigating the idea of how novel experiences play a part in memory formation and in turn set the parameters for our experience of time.
Each day throughout the project an interior image/video will be posted on Instagram with an accompanying quotation related to memory, colour, space, perception and time.
"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer.
About the Artist
Michael Hanna is an artist based in Belfast who uses affective experience to explore areas of connection between psychology, physicality and society. His work seeks to generate new experiences within familiar states by unsettling the semantic relationships between the verbal and the visual, the perceptual and the conceptual, and invoking an awareness of processes that operate below the level of consciousness. He works in a wide range of forms including text-based sculpture, video and immersive environments with site-specific and responsive installation.
He is co-founder of the artist-run organisation AMINI (Artists’ Moving Image Northern Ireland). In 2018 Michael was selected for the Freelands Artist Programme, a 2 year fellowship with PS2, Belfast and Freelands Foundation, London. He has exhibited in the UK and internationally including Rencontres Internationales at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Multiplicity at NURTUREart, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Looking Backward at PS2, Belfast, Short Films about Learning at Lismore Castle Arts, and Predictable Contact at the Naughton Gallery, Belfast
