Adad Hannah, "Case Studies," Equinox Gallery, Vancouver, March 19 to April 16, 2016

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A gymnast hurls herself through the air, curling, unfurling, and lands back standing. Each of the 16 frames of Adad Hannah’s After Muybridge: Front Flip represents a fraction of a second. The likeness to Eadweard Muybridge’s sequences seems obvious. The 19th-century English photographer was known for his studies of humans and animals in motion, typically arranged in a gridded format.

On closer inspection, a bed of black shadows cradles the woman’s coiled, inert body. The shadows are people – a troupe of Ninja-like figures. In addition to the sequential format, Hannah borrows Muybridge’s gridded background, using it to show that the images are constructions; the black figures disrupt the continuity of the white lines without which they could easily remain invisible. While Muybridge’s action sequences are staged, Hannah goes further, constructing a chain of images through collaborative choreography. 

In After Muybridge: Two Wrestlers 2, the wrestlers tussle, yet each physical movement is snugly supported by black-clad limbs, much the way a fragile object is packaged in protective, form-fitting foam. Melting into the background, the shadowy figures are intriguingly poised; they are both present and absent. 

Many of Hannah’s projects appropriate historical works, but for him the references act as foils to discuss other ideas. “It’s the familiar images that pull you in, but then you can’t quite tell what is going on so you get pushed out, pulled in, pushed out,” he says. “It is being pushed out that makes you think about what looking is.”

In contrast to Muybridge, who explored his era’s latest technology for fast shutter speeds, Hannah eschews the ease with which today’s technology can illustrate motion. Instead, he follows a laborious step-by-step process, shooting each frame separately. To mimic the illusion of continuous motion, the dark figures must rearrange themselves meticulously to support the models.

In An Arrangement (Polka Dot Case Study), the second of three series in the show, a contortionist in a polka-dot body suit is camouflaged against a background of the same pattern. In each pose, turquoise bowls are propped into the nooks of her folded body. That she disappears while the pots stand out highlights how we give priority to what we see, or expect to see. The model’s complicated poses are subservient to the ceramic bowls, another way for Hannah to play with the tension created by upsetting hierarchies of vision, the way the eye organizes and translates visual information. It’s similar to the After Muybridge works, where the models’ movements become secondary to the faceless crew literally holding their poses.

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