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C-print, 27"x35" |
C-print, 35"x29" |
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C-print, 23"x35" |
C-print 28"x33" |
REVIEW
Eric L Hansen's Dollhouse
The photographs in Eric L Hansen's series Dollhouse reveal themselves slowly. At first encounter they are immediately engaging with their color palette and evocative use of light. With further, thoughtful investigation, layers of time and artifice peel away from dusty corners. Opened doors imply that more lies behind these seemingly abandoned rooms and corridors.
What is initially as easily grasped in its candied colors as a child's toy-sized plaything is not so quickly deconstructed by logical thinking. The Dollhouse images stretch away, evasively, from the viewer's cognitive grasp through purposeful ambiguity and controlled reference. As grading light streams delicately across the textured surface of floor carpeting or an intricately carved balustrade, all sense of scale becomes confused in the sensory experience of something so mundane yet powerfully reminiscent of place, smell, and tactile experience as to make the question of reality irrelevant. The experience is real, the nostalgia evoked is felt, and the meaning of this place reaches us somewhere other than in our immediate, rational consciousness. The rooms can be seen as chambers of the mind, where memories and feelings are housed in an abstract labyrinth of associations.
The Dollhouse series brings to mind recent works by other contemporary photographers Robert Polidori's Havana series. Havana portrays the ornate, colorful, decaying interiors of its namesake. But his faded pastels and anonymous portraits carry a completely different significance from the scenes in Dollhouse. Unlike Polidori, Hansen uses a place to portray something other than itself, something that hints at, implies, or conjures ideas that can be removed from the concrete idea of place. The experience of place, the emotions, memories, and intangible sensations evoked by this place, are what give it a distinct presence.
Heather Snider
March 2006
Writing for Eyemazing
Condensed and reprinted courtesy Eyemazing
www.eyemazing.com
BIO
Eric L Hansen's color images are deeply personal storyboards of his own connections to post-modern American culture. Reviewers have found his work "distinctive; a new voice, highly conceptual" (Rock Hushka, Tacoma Art Museum), " compelling, a kind of first-person social anthropology" (Alan Rapp, Chronicle Books), and " at once fascinating and horrifying I experience a jumble of emotions" (Jeanne Friscia, San Francisco Cameraworks).
Museum directors who have curated his work include: Director of the Museum of Photographic Art Arthur Ollman, Director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art Robert Fitzpatrick, Director of Contemporary Art at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts Laura Addison, Director of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art Joann Moser, Director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Marc Pachter, and Associate Director of LA's Museum of Contemporary Art Alma Ruiz.
In the last five years, his work has appeared in more than twenty group shows and solo exhibitions, where he has won numerous awards. Last year, his work was featured in the spring issue of Eyemazing, the international fine art photography journal.
Eric began making photographs at the age of 12, and while he later studied drawing and painting, photography remains his enduring passion. In junior high school, he worked part time assisting New York's Bachrach portraitist J. Stevens Dorsey. In high school he won numerous photography awards. He earned a BFA degree at Rutgers in creative writing and theatre: acting, directing, stage lighting, and set design the art of telling a story with actors, color, light, shadow and space. His photography is compositionally intentional, after Cezanne, and darkly expressionist, as Schiele and Kokoschka. Some of his images are painful; some are joyous; some are funny. All are provocative in deep color, shadow and light. He works from his studio in Long Beach, California.
