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CHANNING HANSEN
SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY -
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to celebrate our representation of CHANNING HANSEN by highlighting two new pieces in our online viewing room as seen within the context of a selection of recent work. This new work is now installed in our private view gallery through 7 November. Hansen's first exhibition with the Gallery is slated for Fall 2021.
For the past twelve years, Hansen has explored human connection through web-like knitted textiles. His process is intricate and labor-intensive— beginning with the collection, processing, and dyeing of raw fleece, then spinning that fleece into yarn, followed by the transformation of these materials through processes including knitting, felting, and weaving into his readily identifiable work. It is apparent from the outset that these knitted pieces are not the product of idle hands. The abstract designs developed from dozens of wool skeins hardly follow a standard knitting pattern. They are instead generated by elaborate computer algorithms, resulting in complex webs which can span a wall or fill an entire room. The stretched “paintings" and immersive environments Hansen create link together technology and craft, the cybernetic and homemade, to produce wonderfully intricate, geometric enigmas in wool.
Beyond the mathematical foundations in his work, Hansen grounds his pieces in environmental causes. He sources the wool for his textiles from conservation breed sheep to draw attention to detrimental monoculture breeding. Uniting ecological consciousness with works that combine craft and computation, Hansen underscores our interconnected place in the universe— be it to the earth itself, an algorithmic world of computers, or the cosmos beyond— and asks us to consider what mark we should leave behind.
Photo credit: Josh White
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IN THE STUDIO
Courtesy of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles -
NEW WORKS
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Channing Hansen's most recent work is part of a series commemorating women's oft-overlooked contributions to the sciences. As the artist himself explained, "The idea [...] came to me after noticing how many people had unconsciously (or deliberately) gendered the medium of textiles as female. Science is (still!) rather absurdly gendered as male and its history is rife with examples of women whose contributions have been rendered invisible or were credited to male colleagues. This was my way of honoring them in the realm of art in a way that perhaps they had not been in their own field."
The titles of these pieces pay tribute to two female aerospace engineers of color who made significant contributions to the field through their work with NASA. Annie Easley led a team that generated software for the Centaur rockets, and Valerie Thomas invented the illusion transmitter, an aeronautical device still in use by NASA and for which she holds the patent.
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CHANNING HANSEN, E-Index, 2019 ●
ENTANGLEMENTS
2019Taking inspiration from fungi found growing on the stump of an old eucalyptus tree, Hansen connects observed growth patterns with structures found in neuron networks and galaxies far beyond our planet. As synthesized through computer algorithms, he links the natural, celestial, and man-made technological patterns of the universe into one singular “entanglement.”
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MORPHOGENESIS
2018 -
Hansen's 2018 series was prompted by Alan Turing's hypothesis of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns— for example, stripes and spots— form spontaneously in an organism through genetic abnormalities. Hansen spent a year building an algorithm inspired by Turing's groundbreaking research, one that produced an infinite number of color and knit combinations like a morphogene. Once the algorithm generated a pattern, the artist followed its lead exclusively to create his knit forms, not knowing the outcome of his work. The resulting pieces, with their surprising palette, diverse patterning, and exaggerated texture, captures the dynamism between the organic and the technological that drives Hansen's work.
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CHANNING HANSEN, 8-Manifold, 2017 ●
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
MANIFOLDS
2017Hansen's Manifold series seeks to break free of the organized grid structures commonly found in everyday textile patterns. He was influenced in part by the ideas of Alberto Burri, the Italian physician-turned-artist who, like Hansen, disrupted the boundaries separating painting from relief sculpture. The mountainous, abstract forms of hand-knitted yarn— so-called "manifolds" —contrast with the linear wooden stretcher visible beneath the work itself. With the cross-section of the frame emerging from beneath the translucent material— and the shadow of the yarn cast against the walls— Hansen makes a strong case for a three-dimensional painting, a portal looking beyond the textured surface.
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CHANNING HANSEN, 9-Manifold, 2017 ●
Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
“The construction of these works is partly based on surgery theory, which is akin to collage in higher dimensional space. It involves cutting and pasting and swapping various parts of a topological surface called a ‘manifold.’”
- Channing Hansen
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CHANNING HANSEN, K2:Index, 2016 ●
K2: Index
2016Hansen created these works after viewing Kasmir Malevich’s Black Square for the first time in-person. He sampled the darkest CMYK color sample from a reproduction of Malevich's piece and used that as a foundation for a computer algorithm to generate these random monochromatic patterns. As explained by Hansen, "the choice of black is not a mere reference to Malevich's work— the color also represents the absorption of all light and its use in art has been documented as far back as the first cave paintings. These works are, therefore, an exploration of ideas around light absorption and reflection, around originality and reproducibility, and around instantiation and infinity."
The artist also calls attention to the material he uses throughout the exhibition— he created these works using natural undyed yarn from so-called black sheep, or sheep that are not pure white. These animals are deemed unfit to produce yarn because of the color of their coat. Hansen wanted to celebrate the diversity and richness of the tones found on these black sheep.
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A Los Angeles native, CHANNING HANSEN (b. 1972) continues to live and work in the city. He studied both at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA as well as the Mountain School of Art, Los Angeles, CA. His most recent solo exhibitions include “Entanglements," Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Pattern Recognition,” Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong; and “Morphogenesis,” Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK. Selected group exhibitions include Made in LA 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Thread, Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Alan Shields Project, Van Doren Waxter, NYC; Textile Abstraction, Casas Riegner, Bogota, CO; 99 cents or Less, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Knowledges, Mount Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles, CA; and Intertwined, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, NYC. His work can be found in the permanent collections of The Ahmanson Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL.
CHANNING HANSEN:
Past viewing_room
