hank reavis

Born in 1997, Hank Reavis came of age in Seattle as the city underwent drastic transformations. His early experiments with photography and illustration documented the landmarks of his childhood as they vanished during Seattle’s development boom. After highschool, he earned a BA at Western Washington University, where he began practicing airbrush painting, first painting portraits and traditional Western imagery inspired by his family’s Texan background.

Hank’s practice reacts to our current hyper-saturated image culture and his anxiety around authorship in this image climate. His compositions draw from internet stock-image databases, and textbook archives, in addition to his own memories and emotional triggers. Through his meticulous airbrush renderings of ostensibly universal and private images, Hank’s paintings make connections between collective and individual memory. Drawn to airbrush for its associations with photo retouching, poster design and its multitudinous manifestations in street culture; Reavis repurposes the medium, using fine mists of paint to create an atmospheric aura punctuated by bold forms, mimicking the slippery nature of meaning and memory.