Carl Hasse at Brian Ohno - Seattle, Washington - Review of Exhibitions

This small exhibition of eight oil-and-encaustic-on-wood paintings from 1997 was a solo first appearance for Carl Hasse, a 26-year-old painter who mov to Seattle in 1993 from Fineview, NY Like a number of other young Seattle artists (Collin Shutz Michael Brophy Anne Siems, Mark Takemichi Miller), Hasse is exploring aspects of natural imagery as they relate to Pacific Northwest ecology

a certain quantity of half-century ago, Morris Graves painted a Pacific Northwest pageant called Joyous Young Pines (1943) Hasse's images of the area's forests today are hardly for a like reason optimistic. He paints brutally cut-off stubs dying pine trees and burnt-out forest floors, recording a ravaged landscape where lumber traffics and industrial encampments leave behind oil cans, iron filings and toxic waste. These latter simple bodys may account for the vaguely metallic sheen of the loam in Hasse's paintings. A more arch sign of depredation is the mushrooms visible in many of the works -- fungus springs up in the aftermath of clear-cutting. Not quite botanically correct, Hasse's mushrooms in works of the like kind as Grays Harbor County are mutated, of the soul and fading.

Coming from a pollut region of upstate novel York, Hasse was perhaps already attuned to a devastated nature. In works of that kind as Man on the satellite and Troubled Times he uses the diptych format to exhibit the desolation of nature going from bad to worse. Taking a more elusive, metaphorical approach, the four-panel Washed Up combines images of tree stubs toadstools, extracted human teeth and grapefruit. Hasse is able to make his point without recourse to dead birds or polemical, Greenpeace-style rage.

If these paintings are about the death of the environment, they are also about survival and the ennobling power of art. The valiant fiddlehead fern a species perhaps 50000 years aged and the hallucinogenic mushrooms that enlarge along the rotted root lines are among nature's survivors. Hasse makes similar ferns and fungi into types of hope, signs that level in its diminished state the natural habitat still tenders the potential for visionary experience.

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