Lisa hanson

BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Hanson (b. 1962, Brooklyn, NY), is an artist who draws in New York from the community experience of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

STATEMENT

I begin my observation with the walk along the East River on my way to my studio in The Clemente.  Before times, I thought that through this leisure time I would most notice the small changes. They seem personal to note in this world, yet led back most directly to make the closest connection to the big social and urban changes.  What is the pull on the line?  Some certain irresistible, alarming, pleasurable, disturbing, person, place or thing.  I try to shut my social imagination down to prepare for the studio.

I would rather submit a drawing to its other, and pick it up by its heels, slide it clockwise,  examines the drawing process as though a drawing - or any other system of feeling - could be more evocative for being hung upside down and sideways.  For this map of its world changes its world, is its world, but can the drawing extend beyond its confines of the page?  The simplest drawing may have been brought off when it does not fail the experiment.  Drawing is drawing down a vein of danger through motifs of strangeness.  A play of ordinary outlines of comic shapes inconveniently crowding corners.  The negative spaces yield to patterning positives and funnels and orbs change textures between furs and greases.  On the sharp edge of the experiment it behooves the artist to be happy to leave behind all she knew before, and reject the safety of that exposure, made the drawing’s inside outside and imply the shell of the world behind.  Best efforts are made to merge the abstract with the concrete, to refocus on the process even if racing through gestures and patterns.  Orders to maintain the character of anonymity.  

  Is paper a surface or a material of some depth between the mark and the texture it learns from?  Has the drawing been something learned from the surfaces that rise to meet it?  Stopping to look is a travel backwards to a point of reading its influences, while to draw is in the opposite direction, toward the open, draw down and back into the open space where the drawing vanishes, to be read quite differently from open to filled in.  Reading the drawing as filled in by connotations of people, places, things seen before in this world, evocative of an experience that somehow made a shape in the mind’s eye.

ROOM 514