“Battle of the Carmens” by Artist Ellen R Hanson

A series of paintings on stretched textile by artist Ellen R Hanson. Hanson received her BA in Painting and Art History at Bennington College in 2014 and MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021. Her work probes the performance of femininity: the resilience hidden beneath the veneer of fragility, the clockwork domestic routines that cloak complex inner lives, and the choreographed displays of elegance that must be scrubbed of the strife that underlies them. Hanson’s process involves sketching first in charcoal on elastic jersey cotton, then pulling the underpainting on fabric to create distortions in the figure. Literally stretched thin, the exaggerated figures are then painted over in oil, smoothed of all brushstrokes, and adorned with hints of decoration, creating the impression of a perfect surface. The result is a reflection of the contradictions of our constructed notions of womanhood: frustration, frivolity, and the failure to live up the an impossible ideal.

In “Battle of the Carmens,” Hanson takes on the media-driven rivalry between Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Both figure skaters chose Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen to skate to, an unusual coincidence that set the stage for direct comparisons and commentary. The project also references Laurie Dann, a woman with an indirect connection to Debi Thomas, who carried out a shooting just a few months after the Olympics that same year. Stretched and manipulated, Hanson’s paintings highlight the distortions of reality and history: the tension between internal expectations and external judgment, and the looming threat of unraveling under the pressure of perfection.