Bio
Jaeden Hannus is an image based artist, curator and community organizer working between Chicago and Northeast Wisconsin. He received a BFA in studio art with an emphasis on photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hannus has received several scholarships and awards such as the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship, 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 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, Design Museum of Chicago, IL, Site Galleries, Chicago, IL, Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI, and Photo Opp, Appleton, WI. Hannus is a 2025-26 artist in residence with Artists in Public Schools, Chicago, IL where he is working with high school student athletes through the Chicago North Hockey Club. Hannus has had two recent solo exhibitions, including ‘something once was, something still is’ at Photo Opp, Appleton, WI, and ‘Self Portrait as a Wisconsin Man’ at Site Galleries, Chicago, IL. Hannus recently curated an exhibition of twenty-two artists titled ‘from porch to patio’ at Bodock, Chicago, IL, which was reviewed in New City Art.
Statement
I begin where material remembers. In the rust that stains a wall, in the ash that settles after fire, in the brick that has outlived its builder. Each surface carries an echo of touch, of gesture, of time folding in on itself. My practice moves through these echoes—through material, space, index, and trace—as a way of listening to the slow language of place. I work with what remains. Material traces become collaborators rather than subjects. The image emerges not as a final form, but as a collision—between body, object, and space. The work only arrives when it meets its environment: when a viewer moves
through it, when light shifts across it, when architecture shapes its boundaries.
I approach each space with a willingness to change—to let the work breathe, decay, or respond. I use paint from gallery walls, bury prints in ash, or leave them to weather outside, returning authorship to the materials themselves. through these gestures, I trace the reciprocal relationship between land and identity, body and structure. I ask what land and material remembers of us, and what we might remember through it. In the residue of these exchanges, I find time made visible—material becoming memory, and memory becoming form.