Stevie Hanley

Stevie Hanley came to our attention through the collectors Nathan and Ulrich Köstlin who have been collecting his work for some time. Hanley, the “Dainty Satanist,” as described by Vaginal Davis, has made a practice out of carrying out the Mormon mission he was never allowed to begin due to a failed church administered “sexual re-orientation.” Hanley approaches religion from far out of left-field with an almost martian perspective....

Stevie Hanley came to our attention through the collectors Nathan and Ulrich Köstlin who have been collecting his work for some time. Hanley, the “Dainty Satanist,” as described by Vaginal Davis, has made a practice out of carrying out the Mormon mission he was never allowed to begin due to a failed church administered “sexual re-orientation.” Hanley approaches religion from far out of left-field with an almost martian perspective. “Devout sacrilege,” “the infinite unknown,” and “trans-theism” are just a few of the terms the artist uses to make sense of his relationship to religion. Haney continues, “The problems raised by religion, that ancient technology of the self, have served as creative provocation for my art. I regard religion through psychoanalytic and ethical lenses—a set of practices providing ways of relating oneself to oneself, and thereby relating that self to the world.”

Stevie Hanley’s studio modus operandi is just as spellbinding. “I regard my studio as ’The Pervert Kitchen’, taking permission and pleasure in a practice of maintaining and traversing boundaries, of messy investigations, and the politics of picturing. Aiming to harness the experience of shame as an energy of revolt, reclaiming sites previously associated with a sense of violation or misuse as new forms of veneration.”

Hanley recently completed a series of large scale drawings exhibited in Chicago and Mexico City of vignettes of eclectic tchotchke: painstakingly rendered tarantulas, miniature armored bank trucks, old rubbish, rotting food, faberge eggs and scrawled out sentences, strewn across crumbled sheets. “A coming to terms with one’s own mess at the end of the day, when one finds themselves in bed, and the day is recalled, replayed, and examined while slipping into sleep.”

The artist is currently preparing a new body of work for an exhibition in July at the Chicago Artist Coalition.