Meg Hahn's Projects

BFA Alumni

Major: Painting

Graduation Year: 2017

Artist Statement:

I am attracted to the idiosyncrasies of the material world through internalizing pattern, color, and form. The grid is a structure I frequently use because I want to manipulate and challenge its rigidity and uniformity. I see my work as a series of formal experimentations.

Arts writer and critic, Lane Relyea, wrote about the resurgence of formalism in a 1998 essay, Virtually Formal. My favorite sentence is from the end of his argument. He states, “Formalism has always been shot through with hybridity – it dreams of purebreds and ends up describing mutts.” The idea of wanting to create a pure and beautiful object, contrasts with the reality of the messy, unwieldy, melded constructions that typically results. This filtration system of interpreting a material landscape culminates into a hybridity of inspiration and ideas, which I turn into images.

Biography:

Meg Hahn is a painter who examines color, form, and line, by creating formal experimentations. Working primarily with oil paint, she is interested in creating relationships between irregular forms and color combinations. She is influenced by the aesthetics of her surroundings and daily routine, internalizing sources from architecture, synthetic color, and processed materials.

Meg is originally from Northern New Jersey, and currently lives and works in Portland, Maine. She graduated in 2017 from the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, with a BFA in Painting and a minor in Art History. Most recently, Meg was a finalist for the Joseph A. Fiore 2017 Painting Prize (Damariscotta, ME), attended the Monhegan Artists' Residency (Monhegan, ME) and Hewnoaks Artist Colony (Lovell, ME), and is the gallery manager at Border Patrol (Portland, ME). She is also interested in other forms of art practice including writing and curation.