Ross Hansen: of human feelings

More about the exhibition here.

Volume Gallery is delighted to announce Of human feelings, Ross Hansen’s third solo exhibition with the gallery opening September 6, 2024, from 5-8 pm at 1709 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.

Excerpts from an essay by Matt Olson, founder of transdisciplinary studio OOIEE (Office Of Interior Establishing Exterior), written following a conversation with Ross Hansen, Summer 2024:

"On paper, Ross Hansen and I share a fair amount of biography, we both work with the landscape – plants, trees, soil, stone, light, rain, seeds, humans, communities, collaborative aesthetics, etc. We both work with objects that share proximities to art, design, and architecture, but that we loosely call furniture. So I was happy to be invited to think and write about his new exhibition at Volume, Of human feelings, a group of gorgeous, large, haunted sculptural lamps which were, in part, inspired by childhood memories of an “oil rain lamp” his grandmother had. My grandmother had one too! I guess they were somewhat common in the 60s/70s. Fake brass, about 24” tall, and in the center there’s a Venus sculpture surrounded by nylon strings that, when turned on – besides being a light – heated oil circulates and runs down the strings creating a visual “rain-like” effect. Totally gaudy. Gauche. Ridiculous. When I finally saw photos of Ross’s lamps in his Los Angeles studio, they were literally beautiful and stunning, and I couldn’t connect the two.

Then a few days later, I had a super fun call with Ross. I’d had too much coffee, as usual, and started breathlessly ranting about “oil rain lamps” not really being lamps at all, but rather, these strange stages, almost like a set for a performance we couldn’t understand that would complete itself much later on if at all, a strange plinth of fiction, an odd spectacle, and container for memories. I kept asking about his grandma and eventually, he said with a little concern, “This work isn’t really about my grandma, though.” Which I totally knew. But a space started to open that I trusted. A space of scrambled, messy layers of memories and care that flash with realities (and whatever their opposites are) in: the now.

As a somewhat serious meditator, after a while, meditation seemed to return me back to that same space but with something new every time. Maybe, like Rilke said, “I live my life in widening circles.” The most consistently rich area for exploration in all this has been questions around origination, emergence, inspiration, influence, and their real and imagined edges. I believe in an aliveness of things. That we are and aren’t separate from what we encounter in each moment, and we’re actually not really so separate from each other… We do experience different perceptions through what we call self, but my understanding is getting bigger and messier as I travel, not more defined. If the universe is expanding in each moment, we are too. And at the furthest detectable proprioception where we might imagine we’re separate, we’re actually an entropy of entanglement and connectivity – like weather. Donald Winnicott believed that the psyche exists not inside of us, but between us? Bothness?

I think I first started seeing photographs of Ross Hansen’s work about seven or eight years ago. I loved it right away, truly, and that’s something that’s become increasingly rare for me. Over the last 25 years as photos of art, architecture, and design have proliferated on the internet (and everywhere) and the pace of their distribution keeps accelerating, it’s only natural for a sort of “tolerance” to emerge, a “familiarity” that dulls and can make it harder to locate alivenesses through sight and thought alone. But something about Ross’s work stood out – I think I want to use the word gently, though that feels odd – and it left itself quietly unresolved in different ways each time I saw it. What is it that causes that longing to engage?

Sarat Maharaj describes a way of making and seeing that produces “a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate.” Good work can do this, even in photos, inviting us forward, borrowing our awareness of reality for a moment as they appear, and then living with and in us as we go forward. That’s such a great feeling! You know what I mean? And even though it makes me a little anxious to ask you to come along with an unknowable, often intangible journey… while you look at these lamps and experience joining them, you resist attempting to place them in that static illusion of identity and memories which is made of everything we call “self”…

So what does all this have to do with the lamps in Of human feelings? Literally, everything. Because like the “oil rain lamp,” they’re alive and traveling through time as part of us, not separate. They’re very much still becoming themselves. Design has often been plagued by habitual ties to rationalism and functionalism which get reinforced by linear, hierarchical stories that academia and institutions like to tell in authoritative tones, but are only partly true – or temporarily true – because like us, and like weather and anything else... everything is always changing all the time. So, as Ross’s work seemed to invite me to come closer and forget old stories, I’m inviting you to open to a widening circle of how you think about lamps.

We know now that the function of language is not to inform, but to evoke. So can we make a pact? Can we agree to remember that, in truth, it’s not design; it’s not art; it’s not this, nor that; not speech, not silence; there's no me, no you; so it’s always the same: however you approach it, whatever you call it, whatever you think it is you want... you are mistaken."

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Of human feelings will be on view at Volume Gallery through October 26, 2024.

Ross Hansen is a designer based in Los Angeles. He received his Bachelor's in Landscape Architecture from Iowa State University, followed by an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art.