Bio
Jaeden Hannus is an image based artist working between Chicago and Northeast Wisconsin. He is currently pursuing his BFA in studio art with an emphasis on photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago(expected spring 26). Hannus has received several scholarships and awards such as the SAIC Recognition Scholarship, SAIC Contemporary Practices Scholarship, Ox-Bow Scholarship, and the Kikeri-Sinha Travel Fellowship for his recent residency at Kriti Artist Residency, Varanasi, India. His work has been shown at various galleries and museums around the Midwestern US and beyond, such as Site Galleries, Chicago, IL, Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI, Photo Opp, Appleton, WI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Hannus is a 2025-26 artist in residence with Artists in Public Schools, Chicago, IL. Hannus has had two recent solo exhibitions, including ‘something once was, something still is’ at Photo Opp, Appleton, WI, August 2025, and ‘Self Portrait as a Wisconsin Man’ at Site Galleries, Chicago, IL, September 2025.
Statement
The image arrives late.
After the moment, after the memory, after the self has already begun to shift.
In the residue—where nostalgia falters, where the frame can’t hold still.
Not a window but a wound,
a surface overwritten again and again.
A palimpsest of memory. A palimpsest of place.
I follow traces of what’s missing.
The body that vanishes.
The land that remembers.
The memory that replays wrong.
It becomes a trace of a trace.
My images do not declare.
They hover, flicker, dissolve.
A gesture, a shadow.
The quiet collapse of certainty.
I enter old spaces to find what no longer fits. The familiar becomes unfamiliar once again.
I borrow the postures of men I do not wish to become.
I listen to the cold. I let the land speak back.
It is one of disappearance and return, of undoing and re-becoming.
Not a search for truth, but for echo. I look not to the boat gliding through the water but the wake it leaves behind.
Something once was.
Something still is.