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About
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.
Contact
Email Phil directly at iam@philinthecircle.com or use the form below.

Media
National and International News Features
Last Call with Carson Daly, The Discovery Channel, Good Morning America, CNN, CNN HLN, CNN International, The Rachael Ray Show, and CBS Early Show, Dr. Phil, CW's Online Nation, Oops TV(England), Japanese TBS, Clip Mania (Germany).
Local News Features
ABC 7 News (Denver), KING 5 News (Seattle), KIRO 7 News (Seattle), KOMO 4 News (Seattle), NWCN (Northwest Cable News), WCCO News (Minneapolis), KBRR news(Fargo), ABC 15 News(Phoenix)
Web
Yahoo People of the Web 2007, Yahoo's "The Most Memorable Web Videos of 2007", CNN.com live interviews with 3 written articles and 10 video features, The Grammy's, La Repubblica (Italian), City Pages, MinnPost. Over 25 million online video views
Radio
Radio Free Asia (South Korean), CBC (Canadian Public Radio), The Bee (England)
Selected Publications
Glamour Magazine (Germany), Five, Foam, and World Vision Magazine, Think Magazine, iSh, The Book LA, Kidsweek, Seattle PI, City on a Hill Press