Summer Exhibition at Salina Art Center

Anthony Hawley: Fault Diagnosis & Birdless

Salina, Kan. (June 18, 2018) The exhibition Anthony Hawley: Fault Diagnosis & Birdless brings together two major projects of artist and writer Anthony Hawley and opens at the Salina Art Center June 20 in downtown Salina.

Fault Diagnosis is a multimedia exhibition that explores what happens when things we think we know so well break down and fail us. At the heart of the project is a 1985 Nissan Pulsar NX, its repair manual and a stranded passenger.

“The self-servicing diagnostic sections of most car-owner manuals present allegedly ‘simple’ repair operations. Fault Diagnosis, on the other hand, is as much about unfixing as it is about fixing, about releasing what we do not see, what occurs in the voids and gaps,” says Hawley. The Pulsar is conveyed not through typical looking or driving, but through the manual, drawings, and the narrative fragments.

Hawley’s time in Salina started when he was selected to represent the Salina Art Center at the Smoky Hill River Festival. Hawley presented a pre festival workshop, Imaginary Manuals. The workshop explored the many small failures experienced everyday and what those moments trigger in the imagination. How do we act, react, innovate, and playfully re-envision the world around us? Then, a wheat paste billboard in Oakdale Park challenged festival goers to reconstruct an image of the Pulsar based on illustrations from the car’s repair manual. The resulting billboards have been included in the exhibition.

A separate installation of photo and video work, Birdless, explores themes of collecting. When asked about Birdless, Hawley responds, “We all hold onto things; we all try to build histories, erase histories, and fill gaps in our lives with stories. And we all find ourselves forgetting, willingly and unwillingly, about objects and events in our lives. Birdless wrestles with what we try to hold on to and remember and what we try to expunge. It examines how we store things from data (on hard drives) to our dead (in burial sites), or how we treat and ‘store’ the living (refugees) for that matter.”

Anthony Hawley is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. His hybrid practice is driven by a fascination with narrative, story, and the fictions we construct.
Recipient of many fellowships and awards, he has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Hawley writes regularly on art and film, and his poems and essays have been published widely in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, Verse, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and many more.