Art review
"Maren Hassinger…Dreaming" Through May 16. 10-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; Noon-4 p.m. Saturdays. Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 350 Spelman Lane, SW, www.spelman.edu/about-us/museum-of-fine-art
Bottom line: A potentially transportive retrospective of Maren Hassinger’s evocative artwork is often imperiled by the intrusive mix of video works.
At its most compelling, multimedia artist Maren Hassinger’s solo exhibition “Dreaming” is a transformation of ordinary objects—newspapers, plastic bags, leaves and metal wire—into artworks with a powerful presence.
Shredding, twisting and wrapping strips of The New York Times into coils, Hassinger creates what she describes as mandalas, circular forms on the floor or on the wall made from masses of those coils bound together, like paper moons. That work, “Wrenching News,” contains an interesting contradiction: these lovely, contemplative objects are crafted from newspapers containing reports of scandals, tragedies and injustices.
Hassinger is currently the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This retrospective is a tribute and accumulation of 40 years of her work in a variety of media including video, performance, sculpture and installation.
An alchemist of sorts, Hassinger has a knack for finding poetry in the mundane through deft, thoughtful craftsmanship. She is drawn to themes of nature often, ironically, invoked via human-made materials.
In her sculpture “Love,” Hassinger inflates ordinary pink plastic bags, each of which contains the word “love” written on a piece of paper inside and creates a tower in a corner of the gallery, a celebration of a small human emotion made heroic.
“Dreaming” is not just about an artist using unusual materials and the unexpected emotions they can create. This solo show at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art also demonstrates Hassinger’s unique ability to transform space with her presentation choices. In a striking installation that greets visitors as they enter the exhibition “The Weight of Dreams,” Hassinger uses faxes attached to chicken wire and hung from the ceiling. That piece uses the exhibition space in a novel, distinctive way, allowing those billowing clouds of paper lit from within to softly illuminate the hallway and mark the presence of a unique point of view.
Not all of “Dreaming” is so successful. Numerous videos used in the exhibition, rather than enlarging the themes of Hassinger’s installations and sculptures, actually distract from them. The biggest problem with “Dreaming” is including so many video works, with muddy photography and clunky sound not helped by the gallery lighting which tends to wash the images out. And something about the videos, with their noise bleeding throughout the space, disrupts and subsumes the powerful emotional presence of Hassinger’s sculptural works and the lyrical effect of a show titled “Dreaming.”
One exception is when “Dreaming” gives a video, “Daily Mask” a room of its own. That placement gives the work the presence it deserves, and allows its message to work more powerfully on viewers. “Daily Mask” is Hassinger’s commentary on Picasso’s sourcing of Cubist figures in Africa, which she uses as a way to confront ideas of race. As the video unfolds, the artist methodically decorates her face with a black grease pencil, at first forming fierce, battle-ready stripes. As she continues to paint her face, the lines blend together until she’s covered in black, and an image of ferocity is transformed into one of comic caricature.
