Eli Hansen "This is the last place I could hide"

Maccarone

poster for Eli Hansen "This is the last place I could hide"

This event has ended.

It's hard to think of Eli Hansen and not consider the mysteries of a hometown kind of art. For Hansen, who lives and works in Tacoma, Washington, where he has gained notoriety as an accomplished glass artist, Northwestern aesthetics ignite his larger body of work and pose strong comparison to more typical modes of contemporary art production. The work's everyman, utilitarian, do-it-yourself sentiment stems from the artist's personal past, an adolescence informed by the Pacific Northwest's natural environment and a youthful desire to create with the found objects readily available to achieve an experiential sort of survival. Hansen's practice frequently involves collaborative projects with family and friends, certainly evoking and illustrating an appreciation for the attitudes of 1970s American countercultures and the utopian cooperative idealism found within that decade. What translates is a body of work retaining a visual dialogue with his region, yet never limited by it. Through Hansen's multifarious art objects, intricately handmade glass arrangements coupled with street detritus transformed into sculpture or the subject matter of photographs, the artist attempts to recollect a colorful psychological past for the viewer, not always for the sake of nostalgia, but moreover for a reflection born from the commonplace. Maccarone is proud to present, "This is the last place I could hide", the artist's first New York solo exhibition.

Dealing with abandonment, redefinition, fragmentation and notions of order, Hansen's improv-ed constructions throughout the gallery offer pockets for meditation on history, memory and states of the mind. A walled-off ambiguous space intentionally made to confuse, serves as exhibition access-point. As the artist describes, the exhibition aims to pursue what it could mean to be "hiding while in plain sight, all elements visible and visceral, yet the connections still unclear." With a varying treatment upon his vast choice of medium (colored glass assemblages, steel table sculptures, convoluted surrealist-like arrays of vessels and tubes, all made by-hand) Hansen's work unites within the state of escapade and fluidity that can be found in the processes behind his glassblowing origins. Via a perspective that is typically left out of art historical discourse, Hansen transforms the gallery environment by deliberately borrowing from the elusive properties of his original material, thereby embarking on a more expansive and worldly artistic language.

Elias Hansen (b. 1979) lives and works in Tacoma, WA. Recent solo exhibitions include The Company, Los Angeles and The Lawrimore Project, Seattle. With brother Oscar Tuazon, he has realized collaborative exhibitions at The Seattle Art Museum, Howard House Contemporary Art (Seattle), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC, and most recently at the Parc St. Leger Center of Contemporary Art (Pougues-les-Eaux, France) and Western Bridge (Seattle). Upcoming collaborations with Tuazon include The Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Media

Schedule

from July 09, 2010 to August 06, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-07-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Eli Hansen

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