Eli Hansen “Should be fine”

Maccarone is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Eli Hansen. Displaying a laboratory of hand-blown glass, CFL and LED light bulbs, plastic and chopped wood locally sourced from the artist’s surroundings in Upstate New York, Hansen crafts a narrative of regionalism, subterranean laboratories, the idiosyncrasy of hand and the spectral presence of a storyteller. These ethereal components congregate in the dimly lit gallery space, simulating an environment of codependence. In the penumbral light exists the murky sensation that a protagonist has been there, abandoning the audience to contemplate who will stop the chemistry set from bubbling over, or pick up the shards of a shattered beaker. In both wall pieces and freestanding sculpture, irregularities emerge from glass blown so precisely it could be mistaken as mass-produced. Hansen effectively abstracts the ready-made; though functional, it is in the surfaces’ subtle warps that the hand of the artist is revealed. The objects’ inconsistencies force the viewer to reconsider Hansen’s process, submitting to an immersive experience where the irregularities seem as confident and unhinged as a hallucinatory vision. Coupled with rough-hewn objects of refuse, Hansen seeks to complicate the division between the clean and the gritty. From found objects and scrap bits emerges an aesthetic of need. The do-it-yourself ethos underscores the artist’s commitment to the handmade and a vernacular of the basement laboratory. Hansen’s tables of scavenged wood form a stage upon which interloped glass characters tell us a story. Proof of the human comes into play with the vessels’ anthropomorphic forms replete with cinched waits, potbellies and slender necks. In place of the missing protagonist, the artist populates his narrative with a heterogeneous cluster of objects and substances for the audience to piece together. His sculptures point toward the amalgamation of the differences between a materially drenched reality and the possibility of a more irreducible form of expression, suggesting in the receding figure of the artist that the viewer must be called to this foundational task. Elias Hansen was born in Indianola, WA and currently lives and works in Upstate New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Jonathan Viner, London, UK; The Company, Los Angeles, and Lawrimore Projects, Seattle. Hansen’s work has exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum, WA, Howard House Contemporary Art, WA, The Swiss Institute NY and Parc Saint Leger, Paris (with Oscar Tuazon).

Agathe Snow “I like it here. Don’t you?”

Maccarone is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Agathe Snow, a configuration of papier-mâché and fiberglass sculptures that hang from ceiling to floor. The subjects are allegorical, ranging from the thrill-seeking to slow-moving: from a spit ball fight between school children, a scuffle between Mary Poppins and Santa Claus, to the leisurely acts of catching butterflies in a net, fishing, and watering flowers. Each scene is a part of Snow’s representation of “purgatory”, a present, which loops infinitely, and where hope is the artificial light at the end of the tunnel.

Snow’s sculptures are modeled after early optical toys predating cinema, such as the thaumatrope, in which still images are arranged in a star-like shape on a spindle and rotate to create the illusion of movement. Snow’s sculptures are freeze frames taken at the height of an animation’s narrative arc, with the action culminating at the center of the sculptures. There, at the psychic and physical core, cause and effect distill, creating a centrifugal force that seeks to reconcile the push and pull between action and inertia/nadir and zenith.

These hanging objects’ arrangements are visually accessible from every vantage point, allowing multiple perspectives. Relatable imagery culled from the annals of pop culture and everyday life are easily recognizable and rife with associations. Snow’s unique visual vernacular illuminates an underlying perversity that subverts any pretense of innocent play.

Agathe Snow was born in Corsica in 1976, and currently lives and works in Mattituck, New York. Her signature practice of bringing discordant elements together can be found in all facets of her oeuvre, ranging from her sculptural motifs to the creation of communally shared meals and 24-hour dance-a-thons, culminating in a presentation at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Recent solo exhibition include “All Access World,” Guggenheim Berlin; “Views from the Top, Vertigo and Constellations,” Jeu de Paume, Paris; “Master Bait Me,” New Museum, New York. Selected group exhibitions include “Aberrant Abstraction,” Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; “The Whitney Biennial 2008”, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “In Practice: The Assholes of NYC,” Sculpture Center, New York; “Interwoven Echoes” Migros Museum, Zurich.