Yokohama Triennale 2014: Elias Hansen

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
By Andrew Maerkle


Installation view at the Yokohama Triennale 2014. All images: Photo courtesy Elias Hansen.

Born in 1979 in Tacoma, Washington, and now based in Upstate New York, Elias Hansen is known for his installations combining handmade glass objects – often blown in lurid colors such as neon yellow or orange – and found materials. The arrangements evoke associations such as old time apothecaries, neighborhood head shops or, more ominously, basement meth labs, but they also resist identification through the playfulness of their composition, with different elements, whether the glass objects themselves, or their supports, or the supplementary materials that are placed among them, migrating outside the conventions of display and functionality to create fragmented, miniature narratives.

Hansen was recently in Japan for the opening of the Yokohama Triennale 2014, where he has contributed an installation to the exhibition at the Shinko Pier venue. ART iT met with Hansen to learn more about his work and practice.

The Yokohama Triennale 2014 continues through November 3.

Interview:

ART iT: As I was researching your practice, I came across this series of tinctures made out of strange elements from the American Northwest, like water from the Skagit River or brick from the childhood homes of figures like Kurt Cobain and Ted Bundy, or coyote blood, and different kinds of plant life. They suggested to me the idea of a mythical landscape, or even a totem, in a bottled form. In general, do you think of your works as being tableaux or narrative devices?

EH: That was a big part of that work. The tinctures were a collaboration with my friend, Joe Piecuch. The project was about creating myths and stories out of various elements, like combinations of native and invasive plants, and geographical references, like brick from a certain house, blood from certain animals, water from certain bodies of water. We wanted to bring viewers to a place where things tied together but didn’t necessarily complete the story, so it would allow them to make their own connections.
The title of the show was “Truths We Forgot to Lie About.” Some of the tinctures were also lies. At first, the idea was that we would actually go to all these places, but then we realized we didn’t need to do that. We could get a piece of brick and say it’s from Kurt Cobain’s childhood home, and if we say it is, then it is. That’s part of the myth. Also, as part of the show we were actually brewing moonshine in the basement of the space, so there was a fear of legal complications, and that became part of the lies. We were telling lies because of things we were doing that we didn’t want to reveal, but we also wanted to share it at the same time, and myth was what allowed us to do that. We’re both from a similar area of the Northwest, in the Suquamish Indian Tribe reservation in Washington state, so the geography there – the plants, the bodies of water – is really important to us, and those stories were important. That was the beginning of constructing a story from many different elements.


Tincture from the exhibition “Truths We Forgot to Lie About” at the Helm Gallery,
Tacoma, 2009, with Joe Piecuch. Alcohol, soil from Lewis and Clark’s Cape Disap-
pointment camp site, concrete from Boeing plant in Everett, hobo urine in handmade
glass container.

ART iT: How deliberately do you also work with an aesthetic of the Northwest? How much of your work is about representing the Northwest?

EH: I think it’s a huge part of it, although maybe less so now that I live in Upstate New York. Now I’m trying to understand a new place by meeting people and exploring, and then I will build some sort of myth around that area as well. But I also find things in Upstate New York that remind me of the Northwest, like the woods and country. Maybe the aesthetic of the Northwest is an aesthetic of the country – people getting by with just what they have at hand, with makeshift things in which the old and new are cobbled together. I’m fascinated by those kinds of objects. These are objects that show the hand of someone who was doing something for functional and not aesthetic purposes, but what makes it aesthetic is that there was something that was done to make the object work just so. It’s also the aesthetic of trying to make something look nice but having it fail – like a bad paint job or a bad carving – and that also tells about the personality of the maker.

ART iT: Do you see a difference between myth and subculture? For example, where is the line between myth and subculture when you make something like a functioning moonshine distillery or meth lab?

EH: I think I’m working with the myth of subculture. Subculture by nature is inaccessible, or at least to enter it you need to be secretive. There are all these myths about subcultures, or people who get out of the subcultures and tell stories of their experiences, but actually, once you’re fully out of the subculture and willing to tell stories, it’s no longer relevant. The stories are from the past and they’re already becoming myths. You can either have people with full access to the subculture who don’t tell stories, or a collection of stories about the subculture which are outside of the subculture. The stories that I tell are inherently untrue, but they’re also based on some sort of fact, and my job is in a way to obscure the line between fact and fiction. Part of the subculture of illegal drug and alcohol production is about telling a story to throw somebody off so that other people can’t get to the actual facts of the situation.

ART iT: Is illegality a theme in the works? Is it a kind of creative catalyst?

EH: Yes. Such a big part of the Northwest is about living off the grid. Somehow things are always a little illegal, whether it’s how you get your electricity, or not building your house to code. People tend to do things a bit outside the law, and sometimes completely outside the law. There are black markets of fisheries where people should be paying taxes but they’re not. I think that’s a big part of the Northwest outsider culture. I think there’s something really fascinating about that. The reason the myth persists is because of that fascination.


Top: To be alone with you (2009), from the exhibition “Truths We Forgot to Lie About,” with Joe Piecuch. Bottom: I wouldn’t worry about it (2014), installation view at the Yokohama Triennale 2014.

ART iT: How do you see that relating to the idea of contemporary art, which always exists in tension with subcultural and outsider spheres?

EH: There’s such a fascination with the outsider. I guess that goes back to the subculture myth, where once the contemporary art world gets a hold of it, it’s no longer subculture. I think I’m constantly trying to subvert that. I don’t want to let all the truth out. I want to keep the myth alive so I can throw people off the track. My friend Joe was always making weird things in his house, like shrines and objects, but the show we did together was his only exhibition, and he was an amazing musician and would record music, but he never played in clubs or tried to release an album. It didn’t interest him at all. He used to talk about how he felt artists lost something when they exposed their work and it entered the market place. I’m ok with supporting myself through my work, but I think Joe influenced me in the sense that he was such an amazing artist and musician and had no desire to share it.
I try to keep that in mind in my own practice. There’s a real joy to making work that doesn’t circulate. I’ll have things in my house that I mess with for a couple years, then I’ll take them to the studio, and sometimes they become part of a work, sometimes they don’t. Even here in Yokohama, there are things I was working on eight years ago that have only just found their way out. If I like an object, I want to hang out with it and play with it. The lenses in this installation, I think I made in a group of 10 in 2007, so there are still some left. It’s just so fun to take this thick chunk of glass and put your face up to it and look at things. That’s something I’ve really taken from Joe.

ART iT: How do the individual works take shape?

EH: It really comes from the process of spending time in the studio with the objects. Sometimes my work is simply hanging out with the stuff. I go to the studio and move things around and look at them. I play with objects and then start to think about them. Then I’ll figure out how I want to compose things, whether it should be on shelves or on a wall or on a table, and I shift things into places. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes there’s a long editing process.
The assemblages started from these tables I had when I was living in Tacoma. We used the tables as work spaces, sometimes for house stuff, sometimes art things, and then things would get glued to them and I often found myself looking at the tables and being fascinated by the layers of detritus they had accumulated. The tables themselves, and their craftsmanship, also became exciting – seeing what someone else did to make this table, which is not the way I would have done it. They were very simple and utilitarian. We had one in the show with Joe. Then the Seattle Art Museum bought that piece and I needed a new table, so I made one myself, and then it started getting stuff on it and everything clicked. I make the tables and use them as pedestals, but they also become a kind of historical moment. In the show at Maccarone in 2010 we made tables at the beginning of the installation process with a welder and metal, and then used them as worktables, and then they became part of the installation.


Top: Installation view at the Yokohama Triennale 2014. Bottom: It ain’t what it seem (2014), installation view at the Yokohama Triennale 2014.

ART iT: How about the glass objects?

EH: I try to treat them almost as found objects. I do my own work in the glass shop, but for example for Yokohama I had my friend Sam McMillen make the glass. I worked with him in Seattle, and now I sometimes call him and have him make the work. He’s a great glassblower, so I can give him a general idea about what I’m looking for, and then he has the freedom to try things. I’ll say I want these colors, these shapes, this general height and width, and then he goes and studies the objects I’m referencing, finds other variations that are interesting, and then sends me a box of work.

ART iT: The shapes come from specific objects?

EH: Essentially, there’s the condensing unit. There’s a boiling flask – the round one – and then there’s the collection flask, which has the triangle shape. Say you have a liquid solution of alcohol and water. Because alcohol boils at 190 degrees and water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, if you boil the solution at 190 degrees then it gasifies the alcohol, which passes through this curly tube that stretches out the surface area, so the gas cools and reemerges as a liquid in the condensing unit. That’s the basic setup you would use for many different chemical processes. The other one is the separatory funnel, the funnel shape with a closed top you can seal. In that case you would put your oil and water mixture into the funnel, mix it up and let it separate and then drain out the water from underneath the oil, so you can mechanically separate the two liquids. That’s the basic equipment.
I also have a collection of glass I got from my cousin who was working at a laboratory in Seattle. They were going to just throw the glass away, but in order to do so they would have had to clean it and put it in the dumpster, so it was easier to give it to me. I ended up with a bunch of crazy glass.
And then there’s the glass that I have Sam make or that I make myself. Recently I did a residency at Ball State University in Indiana. I would demonstrate every day for eight or 10 hours, and the kids would come and watch me work. So I started going back to some more traditional Italian shapes and processes. I have this big library of glass and glass shapes from doing so much glass blowing, so it’s fun to play with those things.
For example, there are the horse figurines, which I’m finally letting into the work. That’s something I learned when I started blowing glass in 2002. In the glass world we call them “friggers” – a quick thing you make as a gift for somebody, like your girlfriend or a kid who’s watching you. There are all sorts of friggers, like little bottles or canes or horses or cats – I think it’s a play on the word figurine – and this horse is a traditional Italian trick. It takes about 45 seconds. You take the tweezers and you grab the snout, then you make the mane, then you pull the legs out, and the last thing you do is cut down the butt and pull the tail out and you’ve got this curly little tail.
Making these friggers is a good way to warm up, because the different melts of glass can act differently. They cool down faster or feel harder or softer. You also have to make sure your tools are clean, because if there’s wax on your tweezers, you won’t be able to grab the fine points, so if you can make a pony, then they’re clean. Also with glass, you could spend an hour working on something and then if you fuck it up, you just lost a bunch of money, so it’s good to start with making something that doesn’t matter first.
So I made these horses and kept them around for a long time before I started to see their relevance as an object. It just seemed too silly, but now my work is getting so silly that it felt ok to let it enter and become another object. People usually think it’s a found object, and that’s what I’m going for in a way. Is it all constructed, is it all found? Where does the artist start and stop? That’s what I’m playing with.


Top: Installation view of the exhibition “Kodiak” at the Seattle Art Museum, 2008, with Oscar Tuazon. Bottom: Kodiak (Bedroom View) (2008).

ART iT: That makes sense. I was looking at images of your collaboration in 2008 with your brother, Oscar Tuazon, at the Seattle Art Museum, “Kodiak,” with this huge piece of timber stretching across the gallery, and it’s really hard to tell who did what.

EH: A lot of our collaborations are about achieving things together that we couldn’t do on our own. Oscar could come up with this crazy idea of a tree suspended in the gallery space, and I could figure out how to mount it onto the wall. Around 2006 Oscar was invited to an exhibition in Leipzig at an old coal tunnel, about 40-feet underground, and wanted to make a floor with triangles and parallelograms all fluctuating up some 30 feet to the ceiling, so that it would undulate in weird ways. But he couldn’t figure out how to make it so he brought me to Leipzig, and that was the beginning of our larger collaborations. He went into the tunnel and started laying out with string how he wanted the wood to land, and then I followed and measured and cut the wood. It was his work at first, but then he couldn’t pay me, so I just told him to add my name to the work and call it a collaboration.
I think the trust of brothers is important. We know each other so well that I can trust his ideas, and he can trust me to build them. He’s a good builder, but I have more hands-on experience, and he shares his ideas, so I can get inside his head.

ART iT: Obviously glass blowing is a discipline that you studied, but where did the building come from?

EH: I worked in construction a bit. When we were younger, Oscar would draw and paint and I was always making things. I was doing a lot of woodworking and stonework and glasswork. At 15, Oscar was an incredibly accomplished oil painter, and then he was done with it by the time he was 19. I asked him why he stopped painting, and he said it just required too much equipment. He would have to lug around his easel and his oil paint and keep it all clean. Every time he moves he just throws everything away. So he decided to do something else, and his shows tend to be about making objects from whatever he has at hand. My jobs have always been more physical, doing construction, landscaping.

ART iT: In the sense that you are skilled in a wide range of techniques, you can make anything you want, so what keeps you coming back to glass blowing, aside from the fact that you’ve already invested a lot of time in it?

EH: It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve learnt, so there’s something there. It takes three or four years of learning. It’s different from hot metal work. You don’t get your results for quite a while, and everything breaks. With metal, you can do some basic forging and it might look shitty, but it still exists and it’s done, whereas with glass you either break it, or it will get too hot and it will fold up on itself, and what you were making is in the trash. There’s something incredibly frustrating and wonderful about that learning process, because you don’t have an object to look at. With metal, you have this little leaf you made and it’s shitty but you get to look at it and that’s kind of cool. So I think the challenge is partly what keeps me going back to glass.
But also I think it’s so beautiful – the density of the material and the way it plays with light. Clear or transparent colored glass is amazing. Some of the opaques are great, too. I’m really into opaque white glass now, which still allows you to see through it. I think that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what’s at the root of it, but I let it carry me. I go to the studio and I still love to pick up the objects and think about them. I think they’re really wonderful. I think that’s the fascination that got me into glass in the first place.

Elias Hansen: Through the Looking Glass

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