Oscar Tuazon & Elias Hansen: fogs condensed

The sun hangs like a phlegm in the dirty handkerchief of the sky in Oscar Tuazon’s recent installation at Maccarone: post-apocalyptic desolation in a fine-boned body, corrosive content merged with grace.

(Tuazon images via)

Meanwhile, in Seattle, his brother Elias Hansen talked about his exhibit at Lawrimore Project last Saturday, the show’s last day.

Here’s Eli’s sun:

It’s a lens, the kind used to spark a fire in the woods, or maybe the bottom of a Coke bottle. Tuazon and Hansen see darkly, like fogs condensed, but there are differences. The former has the feel of a massive utterance, and the latter mutters into his hands, his useful, practical hands.

Another difference: Aside from collaborating with his brother, Tuazon appears to be a bit of a solitary. Hansen almost always works with others and makes art about being with others, specifically, what they did in their youths, looking for shots of sainthood through drugs and kids’ salvage saved in cigar boxes under the bed.

Hansen is also a glass blower, which is inherently a collaborative medium. As Jen Graves noted, there’s more than a touch of Dale Chihuly‘s Venetians in piece below, especially the concrete urn at the lower right:

Like Mark Zirpel, Hansen is a new future for Northwest glass. Stripped bare of an interest in the decorative, their brides no longer look to Versailles or Murano. They use the trains of their dresses to make tents, and the cakes they eat come from ovens they build themselves. (Previous post here.)