Phil Hansen’s work orbits around the instability of memory, exploring how moments imprint, reshape, and degrade over time. His practice often involves obstructing or dismantling imagery to test the imagined endurance of recollection. This pursuit takes material form through a shifting, restless, and medically necessary practice: one that drifts from pop culture flashpoints to deeply personal reflections. His choice of media ranges wildly, from the traditional (oil on panel) to the abject (live worms), each chosen for its conceptual resonance and its potential to conjure instability of recollection.

 

A defining aspect of Hansen’s work is its participatory nature. A Death I Remember (2020-Present), ink on paper, is a series of drawn woodcuts composed of handwritten transcriptions of voicemail messages, intimate recollections of death shared with the artist by strangers. When I was 7 (2017) Hansen reconstructs a still image of Bana Alabed, the young girl who live-tweeted her experience of war from Aleppo. The image is rendered from hundreds of handwritten memories from people around the world recalling their own experiences at age seven. This life-size artwork, a haunting portrait of Bana surveying her devastated city, allows the viewer to stand beside her.

 

While Hansen’s work is often playful (creating a portrait of Kurt Cobain from a smashed guitar), it grapples with the human experience of impermanence and our visceral responses to cultural and personal events. One work captures the cultural memory of a pop icon being abused by paparazzi, rendered in chewed and spit-out food, which was eventually thrown away as it rotted. Another, In this Life or the Next (2024), Hansen animates a sequence of historical photographs into a looped gif, breathing temporal life into otherwise frozen images. 

 

Hansen is both an archivist and futurist, a Premnemologist, preserving the emotional architecture of contemporary experience as it may be recalled in the future. He sees the artist not as simply witness to the present, but as interpreter of memory’s afterimage.