BIO // STATEMENT
1991
Hannah Rose Johansen (they/she/he) is a multidisciplinary artist from San Diego whose practice spans oil painting, performance, installation, illustration, printmaking, and digital media. Their work investigates embodiment, desire, monstrosity, illness, gender, and myth—often through sensuous, maximalist surfaces and emotionally charged imagery.
Johansen holds a B.A. in Studio Art from UC San Diego (2014) and completed the Museum Studies program at San Diego Mesa College. Their work has been exhibited throughout San Diego and Los Angeles, including the San Diego Art Institute, Mandell Weiss Gallery, Spooky Place, World Beat Center, and Kristine Schomaker’s Shoebox Gallery. They are also a member of FIG, a feminist collective committed to community-focused artmaking, mutual support, and social practice.
Their creative research includes chronic illness, especially endometriosis, and the ways pain reshapes identity and self-image. Alongside this inquiry, Johansen draws from Japanese language studies, astrology, Tarot, queer theory, speculative fiction, and kitsch. Their practice moves fluidly between fine art and popular culture, merging oil paint with stickers, washi tape, holographic materials, and ritualistic performance.
Johansen currently works from their outdoor studio in San Diego, continuing to develop bodies of work that merge vulnerability, humor, and mythic symbolism.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work lives at the intersection of pain, pleasure, myth, and the monstrous. Across painting, performance, installation, and illustration, I explore how the body becomes a symbol—something to question, adorn, distort, celebrate, or reclaim.
Chronic illness is a primary engine of my practice. Endometriosis, diabetes, and long-term pain shape both the content and the physicality of how I work. I render disabled and ill bodies with vibrant, seductive color to pull the viewer close before confronting them with discomfort, empathy, or recognition. Illness becomes myth; anatomy becomes landscape; the self becomes an alien, a demon, a deity, or a creature caught between worlds.
My performance work uses my physical body as a site of ritual and parody. In Ozempic and the Magic Mukbang Moment, I staged a tableau of consumption, medication, and shame in a golden bikini—exaggerating the absurd intimacy between chronic illness, hunger, and public spectacle. Pieces like Black Mass, Orthohorror, and Self as Goddess II blend humor, ritual, and kitsch to explore how gender and identity shift under scrutiny.
Installation extends this mythology into space. Works like Qurio Operating Table reinterpret African Nkisi nail fetishes and medical iconography, merging corpse painting, vinyl “skin,” rusty nails, and handmade structures. THE LIST transforms anonymized accounts of harm into shimmering, bureaucratic artifacts. Tulleh reimagines the monstrous feminine as towering and tender—an eleven-foot orc woman glowing with vulnerability.
Across all mediums, I draw from Jungian archetypes, Tarot, astrology, and Japanese media, using these symbolic systems as connective tissue. They offer language for desire, identity, gender fluidity, and the surreal elasticity of the self.
Ultimately, my work asks:
What does it mean to inhabit a body that feels both sacred and broken, erotic and monstrous, tender and terrifying?
I use color, humor, ritual, and fantasy to build spaces where those contradictions can coexist—and where viewers might recognize pieces of themselves within the spectacle.