Janice Hathaway

Many contemporary artists claim to be influenced by Surrealism, but Janice Hathaway is the real deal. A leading light of the contemporary American Surrealist movement, she exploded onto the scene in 1973 when she joined the Raudelunas, TransMuseq and Glass Veal groups in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Hathaway’s painterly transmorgraphs create living moments in imaginary situations. Using her own photographs of landscapes, flowers and historical artifacts, she cuts, blends, wraps, paints and incorporates masks and adjustment layers in Photoshop with an approach that reflects Old Master composition and lighting. When the works are finalized as archival prints, they are rematerialized into physical space.

She began her work in the 1970s as a stone lithographer and photographer, and has evolved those traditional techniques into a fully digital approach: a transmography that expands and informs contemporary surrealist printmaking, photography, photo-collage, and digital media.

Hathaway had a solo exhibition in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 2016, is a key figure in the upcoming publication Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama (University of Alabama Press), and also appears in Icepick to the Moon, a film about the early Alabama groups released in 2018. She is included in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism released in 2019.

She is currently a member of the Fresh Dirt group and continues to collaborate with Surrealists worldwide.

Visit the post A Rolling Conversation with Janice Hathaway on the Linda Matney Gallery site to see how Janice creates her transmorgraphs.