Heather Hansen

The Metamorphous Path

may 29 - june 21, 2021

PRESS RELEASE

Heather Hansen is a multidisciplinary artist born in Idaho and currently based in Joshua Tree. Her work merges elements of painting, sculpture, film, and movement.

With The Metamorphous Path Hansen explores the empty but activated space suspended between what was and what is becoming. When she was a student with the dancer Kazuoh Ohno, the concept of ‘ma’ in Japanese theater first captured her imagination. Ma is a pause, pregnant with meaning, or a sense of spaciousness central in daily life. In a line from her favorite Rilke poem ‘I am the rest between two notes’ he speaks of the tension in the ‘dark interval’ as the space of transformation where the notes are reconciled.

Her large scale kinetic drawings inhabit this space between drawing and dance. They are a meditation on the possibilities within her own reach and physical geometry, created in one continuous sitting from the moment the charcoal touches the canvas until the exploration feels complete. Similarly durational, her shadow drawings follow the light as it changes throughout the day.

Hansen often forages during her travels through the west for natural materials, using them as an integral part of her process. Wood that is sculpted, burned for scent, made into charcoal or ink, or stone carved, ground into powder pigment and reformed into pastels. These are ways her exploration of materials varies from grand to granular.

She invites the viewer to adventure with her into liminal territory between ephemeral and the physical, between here and there.