Eli Hansen

Truths We Forgot To Lie About

The Helm Gallery, February 19 - March 15.  

A collaboration with Joey Piecuch.  Labels by Herman Beans.

“It is high time that an exhibition of macho glass art had a weight bench in the corner. Sharing the room with glass pieces on pedestals at Tacoma's Helm Gallery is a Weider 245 Training System. Artists Eli Hansen and Joey Piecuch, in Truths We Forgot to Lie About, have titled this ready-made If I Had to Do It Over Again, I'd Rather Be Feared Than Loved, quoting a criminal who regretted not having scared his girlfriend off ratting him out. Knowing how to mock well is another adolescent-guy trick; Hansen and Piecuch employ it to sly effect.

If you add enough clichés together, do you get a whole truth? Hansen and Piecuch, like the proverbial Northwest "mystics," scoured the local landscape for this exhibition. It wasn't a spiritual search—they drove around retrieving Northwesty stuff: Puget Sound water; brick from the homes of Frances Farmer, Ted Bundy, and Kurt Cobain; radioactive Hanford soil; pea-sized pink salmon eggs; beard hair (both men are quite hairy); soil from a Green River Killer dump site in Kent; hellebore flowers from Chief Sealth's grave. These generic but beloved Northwest elements are combined, suspended, and preserved with high-strength alcohol in (too precious) handblown glass bottles. Their labels detail the ingredients, a borrowing of Dario Robleto's alchemical process.

But Robleto is sober; Piecuch (background in botany and chemistry) and Hansen (a glassblower) are not. The underlying motif of Truths is altering consciousness, whether by drink, drugs, or burrowing in the minds of icons.

The glass pieces sharing the front room with the weight machine are fermenting jars with pouches of peaches floating on sugar water. Five mason jars of clear liquor—moonshine they made—are lined up on a table like the identical black boxes, with illegal drugs sealed inside, by Seattle artist Jack Daws. Two lusciously filthy cheap-print photographs of their basement cooking setup (very meth lab) hang on the wall, encased in thin layers of slightly obscuring, slightly glamorizing bubbly clear resin.

At the opening, while everyone else got drunk on their liquor, they didn't drink any, and when they said they'd meet everybody at the bar later, they never showed up. Truths We Forgot to Lie About isn't either an ironic depiction of a tourist trap or an outpouring of identifications from two native Northwesterners: It's both.”

--Jen Graves, The Stranger

Eli Hansen with Oscar Tuazon

Beer Bottle Test Column, 2008

The Station, Miami, Fl  December 2008

New York, October 2008 - The Station is pleased to announce an exciting exhibition in a recently constructed building in Midtown Miami to open on December 2nd, 2008. The Station will boast an exciting array of artworks, housed within an incredible and unique architectural environment, the interior of which is still completely raw and unbuilt, with the vestiges of construction lending the event a sense of flux.

The exhibition is co-curated by Shamim M. Momin (Co-Curator of the 2004 and 2008 Whitney Biennials) and New York-based artist and curator Nate Lowman. In a pioneering showcase of museum-quality art in a non-profit exhibition, The Station's artworks will include commissioned, site-specific installations, new works, and borrowed works, set within the massive 12,000 square foot space.

Spread out over three separate levels, the exhibition opens in a soaring ground-floor retail space. It flows to a second floor office space, and then to a duplex residential apartment. The selection of works, while not thematic, will be in dialogue with the transitional sensibility of the space, variously investigating architecture and urban landscape, intersections between public and private, notions of design as constructed lifestyle, and, above all, the sense of “in-betweeness” so fleetingly embodied by the exhibition spaces they will occupy. The Station will be open during the day, as well as at night, giving viewers the chance to see works in shifting contexts. Presenting their works in a non-commercial, transitional environment during Art Basel Miami Beach, the installation will retain a sense of immediacy and authenticity.

Among the 40+ artists participating in the exhibition will be Rita Ackermann, Diana Al-Hadid, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Lutz Bacher, Justin Beal, Dike Blair, Lizzi Bougatsos, Joe Bradley, Olaf Breuning, Tom Burr, Jedediah Caesar, Peter Coffin, Devon Costello, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken, Rob Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, Jonah Freeman, Martha Friedman, Katie Grinnan, Eli Hansen, Jay Heikes, Terence Koh, Lansing-Dreiden, Paul Lee, Hanna Liden, Justin Lowe, Irene Mamiye, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Bjarne Melgaard, New Humans, Yoshua Okon, Michele O'Marah, Martin Oppel, Rob Pruitt, Ry Rocklen, Torbjørn Rødland, Amanda Ross-Ho, Daniela Rossell, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Tom Scicluna, Gary Simmons, Haim Steinbach, Oscar Tuazon, Cosima von Bonin, and Jennifer West, among others.  --The Station website

Eli Hansen with Oscar Tuazon

Just Because You're Paranoid

Western Bridge, Seattle, WA, 2008

A periscope forced into the corners of the room, an eyepiece hiding around the corner. With Oscar Tuazon. Included in "You Complete Me" at Western Bridge April 25-August 3, 2008.

I'm going to go back to the new exhibition at Western Bridge, and I'm going to bring a friend. It is, mostly, a playful show that should be figured out by talking and walking and even jumping through it. The exhibition of works by 14 local and international artists is titled "You Complete Me," as if each work of art is intimately speaking to us, requiring our involvement.

In a sense, all works of art are interactive; we bring meaning to a work by our acts of looking, feeling and thinking. But, as the exhibition guide states, about a century ago, some artists sought actively to break down barriers between viewer and object, feeling that our responses had become too passive. "You Complete Me" explores this more avant-garde relationship with art: one that isn't content to present self-contained bundles of artistic expression.

Most of the pieces at Western Bridge do this in ways that puzzle and beguile. Immediately upon entering the show, a big circular mirror guides your eye up to another mirror, which leads to another. The intention of going to an exhibition to "see some art" is amplified in a slightly anxious way — what exactly are we being directed to see? What has this circuit of lines of sight done to the idea of looking at a work from a fixed point of view? This installation of mirrors and lenses was created for the show by artists Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon, who were asked to make a periscope for the entryway; instead they made what they call a "para(noid)scope."

--Gayle Clemans, The Seattle Times

Eli Hansen

Suddenly: where we live now

Various Locations

Suddenly is a book, a set of exhibitions, and a series of public events concerning the new shape of cities. suddenly began in Portland, Oregon, in the Fall of 2008, and will transpire in many places around the world.  Curated by Stephanie Snyder.

Suddenly was born of German urban planner Thomas Sieverts’s observation that “the shaping of the landscape where we live can no longer be achieved by the traditional resources of town planning, urban design, and architecture. New ways must be explored, which are as yet unclear.” suddenly seeks to imagine the possibilities of spaces and experiences that have an indigenous history (the parking lot, for instance), but that exist beyond historical definitions of city and countryside, and conventional material cycles of development and disuse. Through a myriad of objects, texts, and activities constructed as symbolic and strategic alternatives, the artists and writers in this project are re-imagining our relationship to the built and natural environment—its materials, textures and histories. suddenly explores the where we live now as an independent identity to be reshaped in the hands and minds of its occupants.

Suddenly comprises a set of exhibitions curated by Stephanie Snyder, an annotated reader edited by author Matthew Stadler, and a series of additional publications and public events by a variety of suddenly artists and contributors. The exhibition projects began on June 29, 2008, in Portland, Oregon with Michael Hebb’s Corridor Project expedition to Ross Island—a culinary expedition onto to an uninhabited island in Portland’s Willamette River. suddenly has since evolved in various forms in projects in Oregon, California, New York, and now Washington, and will continue around the globe for the next few years. For additional information, including event listings and audio recordings, and to order project publications, visit: www.suddenly.org.