It seems a lot crazier now than it did then, but I’m really glad we chose love.
Elias Hansen
Blue Projects presents an exhibition of new work by Elias Hansen.
Composed of materials such as hand-blown glass, neon lights, rubber tubing and chopped wood, Hansen’s work weaves a narrative of regionalism, backwood alchemy, the hallucinatory cast of expanded consciousness and the lingering presence of a protagonist. Balanced precariously and made from a wild assortment of objects, Hansen’s wall-based and hanging sculpture absorb the viewer into a murky, dream-like environment in which familiar objects carry storylines that can never be fully deciphered. Objects resonate with associative potential and are treated with a certain reverence, tingeing the works with a sense of loss for what has been and a careful optimism about what could be.
A large hanging piece occupies the double-height space comprised of coloured hand-blown glass objects, neon lights and light bulbs suspended from metal prongs and lengths of hanging wire. Saturated hues of purple, blue and green create a sense of psychedelic dissonance, with various modes of abandon referred to throughout: flasks and vessels resemble bongs, gourds and science lab paraphernalia, while bulbous forms take on shifting, anthropomorphic roles. The sculpture becomes a site of flux and rupture, revealing itself in fragments rather than in any fixed way as you move around it.
There is an unnerving imminence inherent to Hansen’s laboratory-like assemblages that alludes to an investigation or something in motion. Presented in irregular rhythms, the works aren’t positioned as resolved forms but hold a variable aspect to them; we connect with their scale and functional-looking appearance but their existence is given to the imaginary or to a suggestion that lies just beyond our grasp. Hansen’s works are contingent, at once continuous and fragmented, positioned between what we know and the expansive, crypto-mystic potential of what lies out there, beyond the material present.
Elias Hansen (b.1979, USA) lives and works in Bellingham in Washington State. Hansen attended Whitman College where he studied printmaking and bookbinding. His work has been exhibited at public and private institutions including Seattle Art Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; American Academy in Rome, Rome; Albert Baronian, Brussels; Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona; and Art Basel Hong Kong. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Anat Ebgi and Team Bungalow, LA; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Jonathan Viner, London; and Halsey McKay, New York.