Anina E. Hathaway’s artistic styles may vary but her ability to elicit emotional responses from her audience remains. Communication obstacles she has faced since birth, combined with her recent cochlear implant surgeries, have largely influenced Hathaway’s work. Her evocative compositions range from conceptualism to contemporary abstraction while often depicting her reactions toward socio-cultural norms. Abstraction allows Hathaway to project emotion and her use of chiaroscuro creates a language where she strives to inspire internal communication within her viewers unexplored emotional territories.
Hathaway creates dripping meditations on the nature of consciousness and perception. Similar to a liquid, awareness seems capable of taking on many forms as it is determined by the composition and arrangement of materials and objects. Following this, there is often a patina of obscurity in Hathaway’s work: a foregrounded layer that occludes a landscape or object situated directly behind it. As a compositional maneuver, the foreground allows that which lies behind it appear more tantalizing. The artist works with acrylics on canvas and digital prints to create her highly dimensional and textural scenes of abstracted nature and landscapes.
