LAURIE HASSOLD: SUPERNATURE

March 8 through April 5, 2008
Opening reception on Saturday, March 8 from 6 to 9 P.M.

The boundaries between art and science become blurred in Laurie Hassold’s work, as she focuses on how these disciplines each negotiate the split between mind and body. For Hassold, the tug of war between our infinite minds and disintegrating, mortal containers is precisely what makes us uniquely human. Strange Attractors, a recent series of three-dimensional Rorschachian sculptures, allow contradictory materials to magnetize and fuse into creatures, which are at once beautiful and terrible to behold. Commercially produced items, such as medical instruments, toys and hardware, are intricately layered with organic remains, such as wasp’s nests, bones and hair, into fantastical plant/insect/animal hybrids that build on the now commonplace practice of genetic engineering. Nature’s baroque and whorish tendencies are strutted out in shameless glory, as the viewer gets caught in a vertiginous web of meaning. The materials list reads as a virtual “Where’s Waldo,” with the alien, slightly frightening appearance of the whole, yielding to the more familiar and recognizable fragments imbedded in the sculptures’ tentacles.

From an anthropological standpoint, these ornamental, bone-like structures are the future fossils of creatures that have adapted to an evolution of impurity, gathering themselves together from the detritus of human occupation. Their predatory appearance suggests aggressive bodies without minds, leaving one to ponder “what will reign at the top of the food chain after the human race has become extinct?”