Hannah Stouffer on a large scale: Detroit

Hannah Stouffer is a Los Angeles based visual artist, but has recently been at work designing and completing a mural to add to Detroit’s urban landscape.  This project invites over 40 artists to create murals that decorate the Historic Eastern Market District in the midst of Detroit’s central art scene.  Stouffer has created pieces of all shapes and sizes, but she has particularly more experience than most with working on large-scale painting.  Some of this past work includes a permanent installation in San Francisco’s new Dior Homme store as well as an installation at Kinfolk Studios in New York.

Stouffer has the unique ability to substitute a synthetic landscape onto an already existing one; therefore, she creates tension between image and reality within the context of public art, art as experience.  Take Stouffer’s newest mural in Detroit for instance, here she paints a sunset and hands intertwined in greenery all within the context of the outside world where sunsets happen and plants grow all the time.  Yet, by making a representation of nature as part of a permanent fixture in outside space she blurs the lines between art and nature: those boundaries blur and the viewer is left with the ever-changing nature surrounding this emblem of Stouffer’s evocation of nature.

This is the power of large-scale installation art.  It has the ability to compete with, or even alter, one’s environment.  Stouffer’s use of bright, inorganic, colors in her mural, now completed in the Historic Eastern Market District, provokes a revision of the perception of landscape.  Her palate, in this piece, redefines the palate of urban scenery: the bright turquoise, the hot pink, the lime green— these colors come to affect the viewer with an ability to transport the self from Detroit to this mystical earthly realm Stouffer has created.  This art becomes a portal whether it is the outside of a brick building or an installation inside a fashion hub, Stouffer’s work creates a landscape to a world we never new was there, but are lucky to get a glimpse of.