"The Unwrapping Rodin photographs are a new step in my ongoing exploration of Auguste Rodin’s sculptural work, mostly focused on his seminal work Les Bourgeois de Calais (1895). The other works I have completed are Age of Bronze (2004), Burghers of Seoul: Recast and Reshoot (2006), and Les Bourgeois de Calais: Crated and Displaced (2010).
For more than five years I have been producing artworks and writing texts related to Rodin’s oeuvre and its relationship to photography. I find his work interesting for several reasons, including the way it bridges the spaces between the romantic and the modern/post-modern, the object and the replica, movement and stasis. World famous during his own lifetime (partly a product of a newly international press) he fell out of favour until the latter part of the 20th century when writers such as Rosalind Krauss took a newfound interest in his work.
In my photography and video works I have long been interested in the dichotomy between people and sculptures. As the human body and its representations are admitted back into contemporary art, I find it interesting to look at the creative, powerful, and defining gaze – at each other and at themselves – of viewers, models, and artworks."
- Adad Hannah
