LIFE

Hannah Stahl makes dark discovery during sabbatical

By MiChelle Jones;

s the 2012 winner of Vanderbilt University’s Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award, Hannah Stahl received $25,000 to cover a year of art-related study and travel. In addition to participating in an artist-in-residence program, Stahl spent two months traveling alone through Europe.

Her love of Rembrandt and Caravaggio took her to the Netherlands and Italy, but something else drew the 2012 Vanderbilt graduate to other parts of Europe.

For her this was an opportunity to leave her comfort zone; she saw the experience as a journey of self-discovery and, for her, that meant visiting concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

“I think that was inspired by the fact that I grew up as a half-Jewish girl and I had ancestors of my own who perished in the camps. Growing up, I knew that was part of my history, but I never understood it or took the time to think about it,” Stahl said. Her great-grandfather came to the U.S. before the Holocaust, but lost sisters during the Holocaust.

Now an MFA student at The New York Academy of Art, Stahl will be in Nashville to discuss her new paintings at the Thursday opening of “Index: The Women of Auschwitz” at Vanderbilt’s Space 204 Gallery.

An exhibition at Space 204 marks the culmination of the artist’s experience as a Hamblet winner, explained Diane Acree of Vanderbilt’s art department.

Stahl’s paintings will remain on view through Feb. 7.

Haunting photos

Stahl said she became fascinated by the hundreds of small, black-and-white photographs of Holocaust victims she saw displayed at the camps she visited.

“I saw tons of those photos, and I’ve used them as inspiration the entire time because they just totally haunt me,” Stahl said. “I don’t know why, I just could not stop looking at them. It became a little bit of an obsession, but the point of my work also is to break (the people) out of them.”

Stahl has only worked on the 10 “Index” paintings since completing her travels in May, “so the show really is a processing of the whole experience,” she said.

The works also will be displayed in the order in which they were painted as a way of showing how her approach to the subjects changed over the course of the series.

Each 30-by-40-inch painting is a composite and Stahl’s own interpretation of the faces she found so intriguing. Initially she worked in black and white, mimicking the photographs, and later began adding a hint of color, thus giving the faces an eerie glow.

She uses acrylics for most of the composition, then switches to oil paint for the faces. This juxtaposition of ghostly visage peering from a void in which clothing and background blend almost imperceptibly is startling.

Multiple meanings

Stahl said she likes the double meaning of “index” in the show’s title. While the word suggests cataloging, Stahl particularly was inspired by the Latin phrase about eyes being windows or mirrors to the soul.

“When I’m making these portraits, I don’t know why, but it’s always the eyes that really are the most important part of the piece,” Stahl said.

She wants her paintings to sting the viewer, to make them wonder about the person behind the face, the number, the name.

“All the photographs I’ve been looking at are of these women who’d just had their heads shaved,” Stahl said. Generally the women were dead about a month later, Stahl said.

She describes the photographs as documenting a “weird in-between phase where the inevitable is about to happen.” It’s that sad, desperate stage she evokes so well in her paintings.

“I think it’s important for people to try to understand these big, powerful events that happened, because if we no longer understand these kinds of things, we can’t understand the good parts of life, either,” Stahl said.

If you go

What: “Index: The Women of Auschwitz,” paintings by Hannah Stahl

Where: Vanderbilt University’s Space 204, E. Bronson Ingram Studio Art Center, 1204 25th Ave. S.

When: Thursday through Feb. 7; opening reception 4-6 p.m. Thursday

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday

Admission: free

Contact: 615-343-7241 or www.vanderbilt.edu/arts