SHRIMP WORLD
HANNAH SECORD WADE
Exhibition Dates:
May 2 - June 13, 2025
Opening Reception:
Friday, May 2, 2025, 5:00-9:00pm
“…Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck,
boundless and bare
The lone and level sands
stretch far away.” ”
Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Shrimp World, our second solo exhibition with Maine-based artist Hannah Secord Wade. The exhibition will be on view from May 2 - June 13, 2025.
Hannah Secord Wade creates paintings of invented landscapes that depict fictional creatures, plant life, and environments that are at once familiar yet alien. Working in series that are grounded in a specific color palette, she builds and disassembles worlds in a process that she describes as a ‘continuous cycle of containment and release.’ As each series progresses, her environments become more abstract and unstable - with land that moves and shifts, as her subjects navigate their own evolution within alternate realities.
The works featured in this exhibition are from a new series titled - Shrimp World - set in a place beyond time, where humans no longer exist. Drawn to the type of creatures - sea, land, and earth - that exist in extreme environments, Wade considers what might survive a changing world on the brink of collapse. Despite this seemingly dark backdrop, Wade’s paintings convey a sense of peace, calm, and adventure, where humans have become de-centered in the narrative of life. The drama and action depicted in these works are slow moving, hopeful, and beyond care - a happy apocalypse.
In Ozymandias Bath, for example, Wade renders a setting sun that is actively being swallowed up by the sea, desert, and mountains around it. Named for the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelly, she considers the comfort of the notion that even the most powerful will eventually fall. Through this series of 12 paintings, completed over the course of the last 18 months, Wade brings a dark sense of humor to our continued political and environmental destabilization. Through the scenes depicted in these works, she creates hopeful alternatives for her subjects, and open-ended, experiential quests for the viewer.
WORKS
Installation Images
coming soon…
About the Artist
Hannah Secord Wade (b. 1981, Maine) received her Master of Fine Art (MA) from Chelsea College of Arts, London, and her BA Fine Art from Hampshire College, Amherst. She has been a resident at the Arteles Creative Center (Finland), Open Wabi (Ohio), and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation (New York). In 2020, her painting, Dog Fountain, was selected by Alex Katz for donation to the permanent collection of the Portland Museum of Art, courtesy of the Alex Katz Foundation. In 2022, the Farnsworth Art Museum acquired her painting, Underground, for inclusion in their permanent collection. Her work has been shown in London and Paris, and throughout the United States. She lives and works in Maine.