Maren Hassinger at TransHudson - Jersey City, New Jersey - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It was the afternoon of the great January blizzard, and the snow had been falling for a certain number of time. Along the walkway to the gallery a line of rippled silver wires approximately a paw high emerged out of the fast-accumulating drifts. Upright plane in the wind, each slim shaft, balletically poised, appeared at one time delicate and resilient. This was Maren Hassinger's Garden Path, which introduced her exhibition's Edenic themes lightly, with a disarming simplicity and open-endedness

In this instance, the garden path l us to the gallery, where Hassinger's two-part installation Treachery and Consolation awaited. a great deal of of the large room was dimmed; suspended overhead, from nearly invisible filaments, were repetitive shapes made on the outside of ropelike strands of bundl wire that had been twisted together, raveled and frayed at the extreme points These shapes suggested long-skirted women poignant in their anonymity and effacement, or domestic implements like whisk besoms Illuminated from below, this massing of shapes evocatively cast shadows high up onto the carbonized iron beams and adjacent walls. Despite the theatrical spotlighting, the humor was subdued. The silence have the appearanceed to contain a memory of not to be found voices, and the forms dangling overhead like dead husks or hanged bodies appeared like residues of hopes and desires.

The other half of the installation consisted of single large, brilliantly lighted wall that was filled by dint of shining "glyphs" - silvery wire material, regularly arranged, in shapes that insinuateed twigs, branches, plants or tree This work recalled Hassinger's earlier series of elegant prints upon the garden theme, now become tangible and plenteous enlarged.

The outdoor path, then, l to a garden, a constellated image of paradise, as well as to a world of knowledge and experience, of betrayal and consolation. Among Hassinger's great forces are her sense of theater and of the the whole Her reiteration of motifs through every part of contributed to the incantatory, ceremonial quality of the installation. This was a haunting and bitter work, individual of rare beauty and power, which more viewers should have had the opportunity to see

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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