State of Emergency: An Introduction To MacKenna Hanson's Debut Show at Formato Fine Arts
- MacKenna Hanson
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
What does it mean to be in a state of emergency?
It seems like everyone is in a state of emergency all the time. No matter what the emergency is—military devastation, climate change, legal challenges—there are emergencies everywhere you look. I have the dubious fortune of belonging to two well-known emergencies: the American student debt crisis and the Hurricane Helene devastation in North Carolina.
I began my senior year of college with a terrible few days in September spent not knowing whether my parents were alive or dead. My sisters—we’re triplets—live in Oregon and South Carolina, and both were spared from the storm. I was spared, as I lived in Chicago at the time. My parents? They lived in Asheville, and of course, they didn’t have cell signal or WiFi to be able to tell us they were okay. I spent two harrowing days serving as the point person for finding out whether Sean and Heather Hanson were alive. My extended family, my parent’s friends, my own friends—everyone was texting me; telling me to send someone else a message. It had the uncomfortable air of a schoolyard friend group. Hey you, can you send a message for me to Stacy across the playground?
This tragic event coincided with me gaining my first-ever artist’s studio. I’d struggled for years to get into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Advanced Painting Program for undergrads, and was rejected the first time I applied. Senior year was my last chance to get into the class. This program is the only way for painting major undergraduates to have access to a studio provided by the School. I was accepted the second time I applied. (I worry all the time it is only because I engaged in some tactical schmoozing before voting began on the second round of applications.)
I was experiencing tremendous dissonance. My triumph, finally achieving my college dream course, coincided with facing down the barrel of my parent’s mortality. Not that this was the first time. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. She is currently well and in remission. I can’t overstate how grateful we are.
One of the things I remember most from September is watching images of the flood and listening to audio of first responders discussing the state of emergency North Carolina was in. I must have logged at least twenty hours of screen time on my phone over two days, looking at the same Reddit and X threads (formerly known as Twitter) over and over. Most of all, I was constantly refreshing my phone for messages from my family. Waiting for news from my sisters and my parents—although my sisters were the only ones I could speak to. My parents, unbeknownst to me, were alive, and courageously fighting their own battle to get out of Asheville.
The School’s Advanced Painting Program is, on paper, demanding. It is three days a week, back to back, with a 9AM - 3PM required workday. If you miss more than two classes a semester, you automatically fail. These rules bend, but I did not let them bend. I generally arrived at 8:00 and stayed until 5:00, and I maintained this schedule the entire school year—I had two semesters of the Program to look forward to. I also frequented my studio on days without classes. Overall, I’d say I entered my studio six days a week minimum. My work was all I had to distract me from the terror. I had my work, which had my friends, which had my studio, which had the art I love and the self-reflection time I needed. It was all a jumble of what I considered, at the time, to be productive distraction.
Learning my parents were alive was one of the most relieving moments I have ever experienced in my life. I shook so hard I almost dropped my phone. But I still had a fire burning—a storm in my future—my six figures of predatory debt left over from my art school dreams.
(As I write, I am fortunate enough to have some of that debt paid thanks to the generosity of my extended family during a miracle which occurred this past Christmas. However, I am still in significant debt. Tens of thousands of dollars, which is small potatoes compared to what it was. It’s still more than any 22 year old should ever carry for the crime of receiving an education.)
I labored under this six-figure debt for four years. My entire young adulthood, my college years, were spent getting literally sick at night over how much I was spending on school. It all came out in the form of some of the worst illnesses I’ve ever experienced happening while I was in college. And trust, I’m no socialite with a penchant for risky behavior—this was stress and overwork, pure and simple. Some may say that I shouldn’t have gone to art school. Silly, right? Community college is right there. YouTube is right there. Why not go to school for business, make it cheap, save money and do art on the side?
Art is not my side hustle.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I eat, sleep, live, and breathe art. I believe in the power of art and I love it more than I love anything else. Just thinking about it brings me to the brink of tears. Art is my religion, it is my calling, and it deserved no less than the best I could give it. I deserved no less than the best education I could get. It is short-sighted to suggest that there is not something deeply rotten in a society where the enrichment of the mind is available only to those born with money, and the rest of us must struggle with alternative paths or debt if we wish to educate ourselves too. It’s not a matter of going to a state school versus an out-of-state school. It’s not about comparing federal to private loans. It’s not even about picking a major which benefits a capitalist career more than indulging in your own interests, passions, and curiosity.
It’s the fact that these are “choices” presented at all, with such black-and-white terms, to young highschoolers across the country. Debt and education, or debt-free and no education. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
These two storms were whirling in my mind at the start of senior year, which is already a well-known period of difficult transition. The destruction of my town, the death of my community, and the possible sudden death of my parents. The whiplash of learning that they’re alive, but I would never be returning to Asheville and must suddenly relocate to Minnesota, where my extended family lives. This moldering debt, accruing interest every second I breathed—relieved over Christmas in a miracle, but not gone. Not yet.
What does it mean to make art in this state? In this state of emergency? My nervous system was shot. Work and socializing was all I had. My sisters were halfway across the nation in opposite directions. My parents were steadfastly solving their own problems, and needed the time and space to do it. I was almost never home, slept fitfully from nightmares; would get up, and keep working. Much of the artwork in State of Emergency was made while I maintained this punishing schedule. Punishing. It didn’t feel like a punishment. It felt necessary. But I was being punished, no doubt about it—by FEMA’s complete inability to save and rebuild Asheville; by my father’s abusive employer letting him go with a black record with absolutely no basis in reality, so it was nearly half a year before he could find employment; by America for wanting to get an education. Punished by loan sharks, by the government, by Mother Nature herself.
But that’s not quite right, is it?
As I mentioned—my parents are alive, and safe. My debt, while still significant, is no longer the dragon in my bed I have slept beside since I was 17 years old. As I write, I’m sitting in a beautiful little cafe in Minnesota with my favorite coffee (malted mocha, if you’re curious) and a hot breakfast. I’m preparing for my first solo show—at 22 years old!—hosted by a dear friend of mine. Clearly, the universe is not out to punish me.
Yet my art is still… well, I like it. I love it, actually. My eye catches on things and I draw them. What’s more natural than that? I only learn how my work comes across to others when they comment on it.
Creepy, I’ve heard. Weird. We love it—but please, we’d rather commission you for something a little less freaky! Unsettling. Disturbing. Mysterious. A strange eroticism. Close to horror, but more complicated than horror. Strange, strange, strange. Standing in a room of my art would make someone feel such a powerful sense of eeriness, they might not be able to stand it. They’d have to leave.
These are real comments I’ve received, all from respected and well-liked friends and professors. Initially, I took them poorly. Now I understand the spirit in which they were meant, and I have proudly named my debut show after this spirit. My art was—is—in a state of emergency, because I was in a state of emergency. And although myself and my family are no longer in the acute crisis I detailed above, this nation is in a state of emergency. The world is. All you have to do is look around and you will see it. The emergency America is in? It’s so obvious, it is almost laughable. Our country is cartoonish. It’s no more sophisticated than the pulp comics I love.
We’re not only in an emergency in the sense of a crisis, although we are certainly in crisis. Something new is blooming… can’t you feel it? The Earth’s crust is cracking under our feet and people are being hurt. People are dying. It is terrible and tragic. We are in a deficit of truth. We can’t hear facts above lies—we’ve lost the grace to know the difference. The grace to know the difference has been taken from us. Wounds are being inflicted on our people and on the Earth that will take decades to heal, if not longer. Things are changing, constantly and always, and as an artist, I must try to catalogue the feeling. To provide an honest archive of my life. Of our lives. Of this very moment in time. The world is emerging out of a diseased shell and into something new.
I am emerging out of my terror; as an artist, as an adult, as a human being.
