Busy artist, lazy blogger and the Women's Art Institute

I have been busy in the studio and busily posting on Facebook.  But for those of you who do not follow me on Facebook:  here is some of what has been happening since I last posted on this blog or sent a newsletter.

Eros & Thanatos, an installation with performance.  18'w x 10' h

In June I attended the Women's Art Institute at St. Catherine University, in St. Paul.  It is a 4 week intensive for serious women artists at all ages and stages of development.  It involves lots of reading, lots of discussion, some writing, many amazing lectures, studio visits with practicing artists, one-on-one critique with 2 professors; work with a visiting artist and the expectation to complete a major body of work. to call it instense is mild.  It is crazy intense.  And I loved it.  I was awake, with excitement, most days before 6 am so I could get to campus and work.  Most days I continued work at home in the evening, falling into bed already asleep by 10 or 10:30.

I started the institute thinking I would be working with computerized embroidery, digitizing vulvar forms in intense, kitschy pinks and somehow arriving at some kind of celebration of female power.  Well, that did not happen.  The idea is not yet ripe...although I do still persist in my investigations.

 

One of the investigations led to a roll of wall paper, which became an editionable work of art, roughly 30" w x 12' long .

The Body Disappears

The Body Disappears (detail)

But, what really happenned, is the installation with performance Eros and Thanatos, pictured at the top of the blog.  I began thinking about ageing, as I always do, personal history, thinking about the ghosts we carry with us.  I began drawing with white conte crayon on paper coated with chalkboard paint.  Compared to the stitching and the printed designs associated with the stitching, the artwork was so alive!

studio shot, Eros & Thanatos, in process.

The artwork is comprised of 40 sheets of mostly Stonehenge paper, coated with back or green chalkboard paint.  The drawings are vulvar/sea creatures/ garden forms/ bones, drawn and reased, leaving chalk ghosts.  The performance has a sound file of sonar, whalesong and heart beats. Silently, I drew and erased, drew and erased until the room grew quiet and the audience was breathing in rhythm with me.

Immediately after this experience, I drove up to the northshore for 2 weeks of sleeping, reading and drawing.  2 BLESSED weeks.  It was so hard to come home this year,  But, while there, I produced some lovely little paintings, ELEMENTS, based on the shell/vulvar forms again.

Elements

Conchlife 1

Conchlife 2

Since I returned home, I have been cleaning and organizing the studio; upgrading lighting and meeting with contractors to install some drywall so I have another smooth surface to work on.  The last remaining super rough plaster wall has to be covered.  I have been stitching, making progress in digitizing.

Garden

And, today, I began some large work again.  It's not really done yet.  4 large sheets of bristol, 22 x30, gesso, charcoal and pastel.  I think it will be a tryptich.

Eros & Thanatos, white

There is yet more happening, mostly in my head...thinking about how to show these things, avoiding frames, avoiding excessive ownership, re-thinking the value that the artwork offers...much to think about.

Meanwhile, my artwork is being exhibited from coast to coast.  A print from I Dwell in Impossibility is returning from California soon.  You can see the catalog of the show at this link.

http://www.svwca.org/2015--on-line-exhibition-of-sexism-a-touchy-subject---catalog-sample.html

Work is being hung in Extreme Fibers at the Muskegon Museum of Art  http://www.muskegonartmuseum.org/event/opening-reception-gallery-walktalk/

And soon, I will open my Reinvented Past series at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts 

http://www.banfill-locke.org/event/future-paths-and-a-reinvented-past-keren-kroul-and-susan-hensel/?instance_id=11709

Good News all around

I never in a million years thought I would make the cut on  this one:  2 of my Deconstructing Power series were invited to be part of the show EXTREME FIBERS, at the Muskegon Museum of Art, next fall.

Another 2 of them were invited to be part of a Women's Caucus for Art show outside of St. Louis, Reimaging Femmage, at the Foundry Art Centre really, really soon!  Have to ship them next week.  I've been trying for several years to get into a WCA show.  

I Dwell in Impossibility  was accepted for the online component of another WCA show:  Voices: Women Unite.  

When I have the link, I'll share it.  I think that show goes up in April.

And then, Garden Book: Backyard  got accepted to the Women's Art Resources of Minnesota juried show at the Phipps Center for the Arts,in Hudson WI. 

And then, Marcus helped me load  the car with the Ophelia pictures and accoutrements today.  I perform it at the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, MN on Friday.  

Whew!  Quite a week!

And I sent out three or four more proposals.

Transformation: The Works of Susan Hensel & Janna Rhae Johnson

Transformation: 

The Works of Susan Hensel & Janna Rhae Johnson

OPENING SATURDAY, JAN 24

Opening reception for this show is Saturday, January 24 from 6-8pm.

Jan 24- Feb 22, 2015

This show showcases two different approaches to creating art from the detritus of human existence. Susan Hensel explores the nature of memory, nostalgia and longing for narrative that may never have truly existed. She finds shreds of story in attics, closets, basements and thrift shops. By sewing, gluing, dying, painting and placing these items with one another, she transforms these items into assemblages that illuminate shared human stories of longing. Janna Rhae Johnson creates sculptural jewelry that reveals the exquisiteness of a material rarely considered as such — steel.  Working with steel belted tires scavenged from roadways and discarded window screen, she transforms these materials into body adornment that challenges the very definition of jewelry, requiring a precarious interaction between object and body.

Installation day at Hopkins Center for the Arts

Transformation: The Works of Susan Hensel & Janna Rhae Johnson

OPENING SATURDAY, JAN 24

Opening reception for this show is Saturday, January 24 from 6-8pm.

Today was installation day...always an exciting day.  I am showing the series REINVENTED PAST in this two person show at  Hopkins Center for the Arts.

Installation begins!

Dale measuring

Figuring out locations

Janna Rhae Johnson

Hopkins Center for the Arts

1111 Mainstreet
Hopkins, MN 55343

Gallery free and open to the public
Monday-Friday: 8am–8pm
Saturday: 10am–8pm
Sunday: 12–5pm

I Dwell in Impossibility, a collaboration with John Hensel, is hung

 My friend Marcus helped me hang the show today.  You can visit it starting November 7, at 6pm, at the Larson Gallery in  the St. Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave, St. Paul.  I'll be very excited to go to the opening so I can see my co-exhibitor's work.  Installing photos is pretty fast. I left Jamie Winter Dawson just beginning the long work of hanging an installation.  I saw fungi-forms in thin layers of paper in her boxes.  It should be just beautiful!

 

Prepping the Larson Gallery show with a little help from my friends.

 Accuracy has never been my strong suit.  But Dale, who works at the Bell Museum  on campus and in my studio from time to time, is a master of accuracy.

Monday we inventoried, marked and installed the hangers on all 15 prints of the suite I DWELL IN IMPOSSIBILITY.  I don't know if all 15 will fit in the gallery... I'll find out in a few days.

But come see on November 7.

Art Opening: Form: Inside Out
                      Fri, Nov 7 6:00pm
                      St. Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave, 
                           St. Paul, MN

Upcoming Show Opening November 7

Art Opening: Form: Inside Out
                      Fri, Nov 7 6:00pm
                      St. Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave, St. Paul, MN

Description

Combining her studies in biology and the fine arts, Jamie Winter Dawson brings a new perspective to the inner body.  Susan Hensel uses costume to portray new forms of the body and to reflect on the constraints of age

Opening includes food and music, all are welcomed. 

Gallery Exhibition runs November 7 - December4



I will be showing:

I DWELL IN IMPOSSIBILITY
a collaboration by
Susan Hensel & John Hensel

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –  Emily Dickinson

I dwell in an aging body:
      emptied of fertility by circumstance and time,
      denied power through chance of  birth and age,
      yet still impossibly fecund with possibility.

I dwell in the creative impossible, choosing to depict the transgression of gender role interacting with age; to create a poetic representation of both diminishment and power, neither male nor female, impossibly pregnant...liminal in all possible ways.  Neither one nor the other, neither yin nor yang.

This suite of photographs is a collaboration of the performer and sculptor, Susan Hensel, and the photographer, John Hensel. When collaborating, Susan sets the parameters of costume and objects to be manipulated and then allows the collaborator to direct the action.  Drawing on extensive study of African masquerade culture, she allows the objects and costumes to inhabit her will, allowing her aged, broken body to dance free in the spirit of the costume.

What is pictured here?

Susan, a sixty-four year old woman, pregnant, wearing a power suit and celluloid collar.

In truth, tired, drugged, in post-surgical condition, constrained from using her right arm but wearing her scars proudly. She channels a sensual force, dancing in a masquerade.

The imagery reveals a transgressive combination of outright sexual power with outright male power. There is a certain shamanistic aspect to this, the mysterious power of birth vs. the physical male strength and political power.

The handmade paper pregnant belly was cast from molds made progressively of a young pregnant woman as her body swelled with life.  It is also a repurposing of part of an old installation called Erin's Belly:Protected Real Estate.

A woman wearing a man's power suit defies cultural expectations.

Pregnancy is an image of creativity, but also an image of youth. Here an aged woman wearing a pregnant belly and exposing false breasts again defies expectations.

"It's hard for me, at the age of 64, to understand gender as construct.  In my days in the college classroom, gender was what you were born with, while behaviors surrounding gender were mutable. Both the language and the understanding has changed. In this new millennium, I can think of gender as a costume, a masquerade, imposed or chosen."                                                      -Susan Hensel

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Also showing in the Larson Gallery is the work of Jamie Winter Dawson.  Please visit her website to get a preview of the sorts of things you might see from her.
Put this on your calendar, too!

Concordia College TRUTH TELLING: Jerome fiber artists Nov. 13 - Jan. 3, opening reception November 13, 5-8pm