STATION TO STATION: LAUREL SPARKS AND
SHAWN HANSEN
FEBRUARY 27 - APRIL 3, 2022
Opening: Sunday, February 27th, 3-6pm
Gallery hours: 4-6pm, Sundays, with performance at 5
SOLOWAY Gallery is thrilled to present Station to Station, an installation and durational performance collaboration between visual artist Laurel Sparks and sound artist Shawn Hansen from February 27th to April 3rd. The installation will consist of a painted floor cloth mirroring a string figure which spans the ceiling of the gallery as well as a t.v. set playing an evolving video and sound loop. Each Sunday Sparks will map a new string figure on top of the previous, gradually building up and layering mono colored fabric chains. On February 27th, March 13th and April 3rd, Hansen will perform live, mixing his sound compositions made from analog synths and saxophones. Both Hansen’s sound and video compositions and Spark’s performances are derived from a mathematical poetry system, the sestina, in which they collaborated over a period of three years.
Sparks and Hansen share an interest in string figures as well as esoteric divination. The sestina is driven by the number six, and Hansen and Sparks chose the six-sided hexagram as the geometric structure for their string figure. The hexagram is created by the lines that originate from six points which are the “stations” referred to in the title. The string figure’s linear paths as well as the floor cloth’s solid shapes are determined by the number sequencing within the sestina. Through the sestina format, Hansen and Sparks re-envision the string figure, a preliterate story telling device, as a contemporary divination tool. Instead of giving the string figure a message to tell, Sparks and Hansen watch and listen to what the string figure has to say.
At five pm each Sunday Sparks will recite a sestina while installing a fresh string figure onto the gallery ceiling as the recording or live performance of Hansen’s new score plays. The previous week’s installation, video and sound track will be on display each Saturday. At the conclusion of the show, six constellations of colored bricolage chains will span the ceiling, rhyming with the colored floor cloth below and transforming the space into a large geometric matrix within a sonic field.
Text by Hannah Barrett
Shawn E Hansen is a phonographer, composer, and improviser from Kansas, living in Boston. His main instruments include synthesizer, organ, piano and saxophone. He is a 2018 Charlotte Street Performing Arts Fellow. Shawn has taken his three main pursuits and reduced them into three functions central to each. The Phonographer listens, the Composer meditates, and the Improviser acts. With these three postures and tenets he approaches life and art, practice and performance. A long relationship with vintage analogue synthesizers and modern experimental hand-built electronics has informed his performance aesthetic and cultivated an interest in unconventional compositional practices ranging from durational and endurance performances to more conceptual works for in and out of the gallery setting. Shawn is an accomplished piano technician and this work has allowed him to specialize in non-standard tuning systems and scales. These historic and experimental tunings are present in his compositions and improvisations. He performs with Mike Pride (NY), painter Laurel Sparks (NY), and makes films with writer Cyrus Console (KC). Shawn runs KJEA-radio, a transmitted conceptual space first broadcast in 1984. He studied with Maryanne Amacher, Richard Teitelbaum, George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros at Bard in 2001.
Archive: https://shawnedwardhansen.bandcamp.com
Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies geometric symbol systems and the transmitting potential of pattern and materiality. She holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, MA. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn and group shows at Cheim and Read gallery, NYC; EFA Project Space, NYC;; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC; EFA Project Sparce, NYC;Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Art In General, NYC. Sparks’ work has been reviewed in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Blouin Artinfo, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Modern Painters, New American Paintings, the Drawing Center’s the Bottom Line, Art21 Magazine, Vogue Mexico, Boston Globe, Art in America, Bloomberg, Timeout New York, Huffington Post, and Art and Auction. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, Residenza del Palmerino, Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, IT, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship
