Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg: Cohan and Leslie

a whole s of social activity and interpersonal communication and the breakdowns that plague them provided the organizing principles for the novel exhibition by the New York-based artist team of Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg. Profuse and appealingly offhanded, the display by the Canadian-born duo featured a certain quantity of fifty jointly produced works that ranged from a sprawl of technically brilliant pale cerulean and green freestanding polystyrene plastic arts to cryptic wall-based arrangements of photos and text-cover drawings. With a taste for collisions between unlikely subdue matter--a head-scratching new artist's volume is devoted entirely to alternating images of hockey fights and pieces of fruit, the latter locate in strange, Franz West-like lumpy masses of white plaster--Hanson and Sonnenberg have evolveed an approach that, in its specifics, can occasionally have feeling like a confoundingly elusive inside crank Yet taken as a whole, their work demonstrates a willingness to take chances in their pursuit of fresh hybrid forms, especially those that summon forth the complex arrays of conditions and negotiations from one side which individuals interact.

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In spite of a description in the gallery statement likening the team's chaotically schematic, flowchartlike drawings to a Rosetta stone, these maps of everything from daily errands to astronomical bodies to the pair's have working process, mostly displayed upon the wall in constellations with the two found and original photographs of race in group settings, did little to help explain the mysteries of the sometimes puzzling exhibition. For greatest in quantity viewers, however, these will have been little more than background for the duo's more or les life-size statuarys of equipment from communal settings like sporting occurrences concerts, and political rallies. sum of two units works titled Soap Box, 2003-2004 featured collections of seafoam-colored microphones arranged upon a pair of press conference-style stands, their drawn out electrical cords trailing uselessly down to the floor; nearby,

Third Party, 2003-2004 implied a sort of wearied rock-show setting, complete with loudspeakers, an amp, and without contents beer coolers, all in pale pastel. Foamcore lights were strung above the swing like it was a fairground dance hall, while the centerpiece of the entire arrangement was a colossal pile of wreckage--a statuary of a sports scoreboard that looked to have crashed to the clod Modeled on an actual fallen scoreboard from a hockey arena pictured in a photograph in the show's back play Hanson and Sonnenberg's Scoreboard, 2003-2004 is a piece of sheer bravura, a tangle of tilted planes and sprung wires that made a thing, unremarkable when intact, into a ruin rich with lyrical fascination.

Hanson and Sonnenberg's thing perceiveds and scenarios are all obviously suggestive of transmission, exchange, and the herd yet works like Scoreboard make it clear they remain skeptical toward the combination of parts to form a wholes that facilitate and govern interaction among family For them, the technological furnishings of novel community signify potential but also the consistent failure to connect--hence all the figure of speechs of disruption and disconnection interwoven into their scenarios, in which the equipment, greatest in quantity of which is conspicuously unplugg summons absence and impediment rather than social dynamism. It's hardly unprecedent for collaborative shoot forwards to foreground the mechanisms of teamwork and cooperation. still Hanson and Sonnenberg's willingness to problematize these mechanisms, to embrace their flaws and to search for new forms of narrative in them, insinuates that their promising communal enterprise, at least, is completely functional.

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