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Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of new works by Glen Baldridge and Elias Hansen. Both artists use and distort traditional art making and craft techniques to explore new territory in painting and sculpture. A subtle darkness and wry humor pervade the works which reference underground cultures surrounding music scenes, drug labs, and the spirit of centuries of DIY ne’er-do-wells and virtuosic craftsman alike.
Glen Baldridge’s new paintings extrapolate age-old paper marbling techniques to make abstract paintings of camouflaged texts. Drawing from subculture slang and teen text abbreviations, phrases like “Wait, Whut?”, “Rat Bite”, “Bongs and Thongs”, and “Vapor Die” are hidden in dense eddies of acrylic paint. Using his own hand made tools, Baldridge deftly manipulates the viscous paint for results that demonstrate both detailed control and material entropy. Their effects mimic the swirls of head shop paraphernalia as well as ancients manuscripts.
With similar dexterity and vernacular Hansen’s objects, installations and chandeliers are comprised of an assortment of hand blown pipettes, flasks and beakers alongside rough-cut wood, chains, rubber tubing and light bulbs. These interrelated materials are gathered into arrangements that reference the fragility of both the precious and the discarded found in a tinkerer’s shed. The authentic and the reproduced are called into question though his hand-blown glass objects that convey a regularity, not unlike that of a mass-produced process, and emanate fragments of real and imagined narratives.
Elias Hansen has had recent solo exhibitions with Cooper Cole, Toronto; Take Ninagawa, Tokyo; Jonathan Viner, London; Maccarone, NY; Balice Hertling, Paris; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark, NY; Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans; as well as solo include solo presentations at LISTE, Basel and Frieze Frame, London. Hansen’s work has been exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum, WA, Howard House Contemporary Art, WA, and Parc Saint Leger, Paris (with Oscar Tuazon). Selected press includes articles in Art Review, Mousse Magazine, Art Agenda, Art Forum, Los Angeles Times, and The Stranger. He has been awarded the PONCHO Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum. Hansen will have solo exhibitons with Anat Ebgi and Team (Bungalow) in Los Angeles this fall.
Glen Baldridge’s work has been collected and exhibited internationally, with recent solo showings at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton; and Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR. Baldridge has had print works published by Forth Estate, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Diue Donné, Flying Horse Editions, and PS Marlowe. His work is included in the collections of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY Public Library, RISD Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and Library of Congress, amongst others. Baldridge will have a solo exhibition with Klaus von Nichtssagend in New York this fall.
Glen Baldridge & Elias Hansen
Halsey McKay Gallery