CULVER CITY: Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger, Wrenching News (detail), 2008, Shredded, twisted and wrapped newspapers (mostly NY Times), 12 inches high, dimensions variable. 
Image via marenhassinger.com. 

Almost Weightless

April 19 – May 24, 2014

Artist reception: Saturday, April 19, 2014, 6:00pm – 9:00pm

REGINALD INGRAHAM GALLERY

6021 West Washington Boulevard

Culver City, CA

From Reginald Ingraham Gallery e-blast:

Reginald Ingraham Gallery presents Maren Hassinger: Almost Weightless. Hassinger, a native of Los Angeles, is the Director of Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been featured in exhibitions across the country, including the Hammer Museum’s recent Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980.

Maren Hassinger’s sculptural range is extensive. She began her career in LA, working with wire, metal and concrete, and has continuously explored various materials including paper, leaves, branches, wood blocks, plaster, and plastic bags. No matter the medium, her pieces have a kinetic feel, a visceral weaving of composition and form. Hassinger uses this nexus to give her work an ethereal quality that challenges the structure and meaning of objects, as well as the weight and the intention of her practice.

Almost Weightless measures the heaviness of the news against the sometimes unbearable lightness of love. In this conversation of highs and lows, Hassinger plays with the ideas of density and context, inviting the viewer in as she turns conventional wisdom into powerful imagery. Her work questions how texture and narrative intersect, layering experience and creating unintended possibilities from the manipulation of everyday matters.

In addition to Hassinger’s sculpture, she is widely known for her performance pieces, especially her early collaboration with Senga Nengudi. Staged in galleries, gardens, museums, highway underpasses and where the spirit moves her, Hassinger’s presentations have been captured on video by her and her contemporaries, including David Hammons and Ulysses Jenkins, and can be found in major collections.

Reginald Ingraham Gallery is proud to mount Almost Weightless in Los Angeles, in advance of Hassinger’s major retrospective at Spellman College in Atlanta.