Eli Hansen: Next Time, They’ll Know It’s Us

Issue 49, April 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

The Company, Los Angeles
21 January – 26 February

By Andrew Berardini

It’s easier to get there than it is to leave. Sometimes people never leave. Supplies are sparing or expensive, and so the natives survive with what’s on hand; jury-rigging is common, and the skills most prized are those of independence (homebuilding, crafts, mechanics). Backwoods alchemists used to make moonshine with elaborate concoctions and equipment, the sinister piping and processing bent into elbows and curved around itself, scuffed and bruised. Though moonshine might still get cooked up in certain Appalachian neighbourhoods, the main product for rural chemists these days is methamphetamine, made with dangerous and rattletrap methods out of medicines and cleaning products you might find in your bathroom. Instead of white lab coats you see overalls and T-shirts, trucker hats and biker vests. But backwoods alchemists are still chemists of a kind, scientific experts with a technological expertise derived from years, sometimes generations of having to make do making drugs, or otherwise having to figure out how to craft things by hand.

The glass for beakers and pipettes here are handblown, but less objet d’art and more hippy make-do, a sense of the psychedelic infused with the real need to have something to smoke pot (or speed) out of. It homes in on that tender moment sometime in the 1970s when the hillbillies got replaced by hippies and bikers in the American wilderness.

Vashon Island, Washington state, where artist Eli Hansen currently resides, is one of these places. Unconnected by any road from the mainland, though technically really close to the metropolis of Seattle, it’s a good place to get lost in the Pacific Northwest, not off the grid exactly, but close to being off the grid. Hansen, formerly of Tacoma, seems to have connected all the strange strains of regional life into something rather wonderful that easily finds a fitting though unlikely home in contemporary art.

His sculptures mix purchased and blown pipettes into elaborate, semifunctioning fountains and crypto-mystic objects, where LED lights flicker beneath crystalline blown glass and the lists of materials might sometimes require either a shaman or a chemist to interpret. Wood recovered from crumbling houses and from the drift found on the beach is incorporated into sculptures which, with coloured beakers and simple machines, feel like artefacts from a different civilisation, and in some ways they are.

While so-called regional art can come off as treacly or dumb (think cow-skull paintings or the fascist faux-wonderland of Thomas Kinkade), Hansen has found a way to collapse all the idealism and escapism, outlaws and dropouts of his rural home into a compelling visual language, one that’s tinged with a real human emotion, all the regrets and magic of weathered ideals. Reading the titles of Hansen’s pieces (We didnt plan it this way; we just got older or If I could explain how things ended up this way, I wouldnt be here, all works 2011) fills one with a sense of hope and eventual sadness about what we set out from and where we actually ended up.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire April issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.