Profile on Janice Hathaway
By Ruurdje Laarhoven
Janice Hathaway 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. Her transmorgraphs, using her own photographs, merge dreams and fantasy, the conscious and unconscious to create a surreality to liberate the human spirit.
Hathaway intuitively decided to major in art at the University of Alabama in 1969; although she had little experience in the subject, she sensed that she was an artist. Becoming an artist during this era of change with a growing sense of politics and feminism had a direct impact on her development as an individual and as an artist. Around the time when she entered college, the Haight Ashbury Street events in San Francisco had begun.
Tuscaloosa was home to students from the Tuscaloosa community and those that came from Birmingham, Eutaw and Sheffield. Hathaway discovered others who were artists, performers, and musicians. All members had developed special interests in various subjects such as art, music, dance, ideas, politics, or philosophy, topics around which many of the discussions took place. The ground was fertile for experimentation and a perfect springboard for a transformation. A collective formed to explore avant-garde music, art and performance with three separate but overlapping groups, Raudelunas, TransMuseq and Glass Veal. Pataphysics and Dada informed the larger group, Raudelunas. A smaller group, Glass Veal, began to read and hold surrealist activities such as collective writing and drawing. This collective inquiry led to the formation of Glass Veal in 1979. Hathaway began working conscientiously as an established surrealist at that time. Musicians LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams formed TransMuseq in 1974 and have been at the forefront of international improvisational music ever since.
In addition to exploring her early image making as a stone lithographer and photographer while in graduate school, Hathaway made documentary photographs of many of the sessions and public events along with portraits of people in the group leaving a visual memory of parades, music, theater and dance productions.
Hathaway’s photographs and participation can be seen in films and publications about the groups including the upcoming publication Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama, Steven Harris, University of Alabama Press; Icepick to the Moon, a film about Raudelunas released in 2018 and in Janice’s 2016 catalog for her exhibition Liquid Solaris at The Eugenio Granell Fundación in Santiago de Compostela Spain. The University of Alabama Special Collections plans to host a digital archive of the groups and individuals.
UPCOMING PROJECT WITH JANICE HATHAWAY
JANICE HATHAWAY: TRANSMORGRAPHY
February 7 - March 14, 2020
Janice Hathaway’s transmorgraphs are living moments as imagery situations. Her exhibition, transmorgraphy, at the Linda Matney Gallery from February 7 through March 14, 2020, features her new process of artistic composition, which she invented and has developed over the past several decades. Her transmorgraphs suggest a strong interplay between plausible and implausible, teasing the viewer to suspend disbelief in the presence of her “surreality” merging dreams and fantasy, the conscious and unconscious. Janice lives in Williamsburg Virginia and teaches Graphic and Media Design at Thomas Nelson Community College.
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
Pictured: Naturalglacé, 2018, Archival print, 19 × 14 in, View on Artsy