Elias Hansen @ Lawrimore Project (review)

This extensive, light-filled gallery provides the back rooms, hallways, and cement-floored spaces necessary for us to explore Hansen's work.  "We Used To Get So High" is a dirty mirror reflecting our young selves' inquiries into drug-warped perceptions.  If the lawn chair on the portaledge bolted to a retaining wall over railroad tracks or the guitar-shaped coffin box lined with a dirty blanket feel inviting to you, the drugs have not worn off.  And they may not ever:   Here the giant white pentagonal shapes emerging from the white wall are the chemical makeup of LSD--and you are let in on the grand idea that it's bigger than you.     

The show is darkly humorous and it's fun to get completely lost in it.  The Lawrimore space rocks for this show.  Cremaster Six, the slinky white cat, roams around, too, making the whole show more surreal.

PHOTOS by ABJ Seattle Glass Online

Eli Hansen @ The Lawrimore Project

April 2010 Lawrimore Project website:

"“We Used To Get So High,” an exhibition of new work by Elias Hansen, is that redemptive look back while at the same time laying bare the problems and impotence of hindsight.  Working with found objects and meticulously crafted glass, sculptural and photographic elements, Hansen imbues his ad hoc constructions with poetically-weighted meditations on place, history and memory.  There are three strains distinct to Northwest aesthetics informing Hansen’s work—the handmade, the utilitarian and the spiritually-charged. Tapping the revolutionary energy of the outmoded, the work’s back woods, d.i.y. look was born out of the formative years he spent on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with his brother and friends who were compelled to create but constrained by the materials and objects that were on hand.  These youthful collaborations in the traditions of 70s countercultures, utopian thought and alternative lifestyles have continued into his mature work producing major projects with the same set of friends in museums, institutions and art spaces throughout the world.  Although his visual vernacular is associated with the Pacific Northwest, Hansen’s pathologic deployment of these materials and forms give them power beyond the place itself; their specificity of origin belying their universal spirit and import.  His objects, moments and recollections are handed down, not for the sake of nostalgia alone, but become our charge for reflection and transmission.  This is the artist’s first one-person exhibition with the gallery."

April 1-May 8, 2010

Hours

Tuesday - Saturday    10:00 am - 5:30 pm

Or by appointment

831 Airport Way S.,  Seattle, WA  98134

(206) 501-1231