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.
Essay by Matt Olson, founder of transdisciplinary studio OOIEE (Office Of Interior Establishing Exterior), written after a conversation with Ross Hansen, Summer 2024:
Part 1: It’s hard to find a good lamp
On paper, Ross Hansen and I share a fair amount of biography. We’re both from the Midwest, he Iowa, me South Dakota and then Minnesota. We both work with the landscape – plants, trees, soil, stone, light, rain, seeds, humans, communities, collaborative aesthetics etc. And 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. I still hadn’t seen Ross’s lamps but based on this point of inspiration, I started thinking.
I thought back through my own mostly forgotten memories with this lamp as a child. The grown-ups didn’t like turning it on because the kids always wanted to touch it which could be messy and – I’m not even sure this part was true – but they warned that, because of the hot oil, the lamp was actually a little dangerous, which only made my kid fascination grow. But 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.
So next I decided to research “oil rain lamps” a bit, clicking on the first link, a video called Restoring a Oil Rain Lamp Part 1 by TheHandyAndy… but there was a weird vibe. TheHandyAndy seemed bummed and somber sitting in his messy garage filming. It turned out the lamp he was restoring belonged to his grandmother, then his Mom, now him. His Mom’s deathiversary was about a week away, and he was doing this restoration to honor their memory. He shared an aside that his Grandma had died a pretty tough death due to Mad Cow Disease (which was a curveball.) Then he shared old family photos complete with 70s clothes and coloring, the “rain lamp” quietly in the background, usually out of focus and odd… but suddenly this video actually started feeling like art. Thinking of this dusty, clumsy, messy, gaudy lamp traveling through time within a family, no one really knowing that it’s carrying along fragments of memories and identities. Still, even as I started getting interested in these deeper ways, each time I went back to Ross’s lamps, they felt even further away in any literal sense.
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, a creator of humility. 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 something was coming to get me. I talked about a Seth Price essay Decor Holes and how Jonas Mekas films turned the everyday into something magical without any discernible effort. How Heidegger differentiated between the everyday meaning of “being” and what he saw as the human ability to access a higher space called “Being”… and I love that, being vs. Being and our ability to be both. Finally, we ended up back at his Grandma and her love of cats, and how that shaped the decor of their home. Statues and photos of cats, but… she never had a cat. 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.
Part 2: “Excuse me I’m lost. Who are you? Why aren’t you coming to me?” Come Down To Us – Burial
For some reason, it doesn’t really sound true to me (which is weird because it is) but I’ve spent the bulk of my life involved in actions and ideas that relate to various forms of art, design and what I guess some call “cultural production.” Thankfully, it’s gone through all sorts of different frames and traveled in directions that I definitely didn’t see coming. And even through some dark times when I thought I wasn’t really interested anymore. But 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?
Part 3: With, by, through, because, towards, despite…
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?
The curator Anthony Huberman wrote well about this space in a 2007 essay called “I [Not Love] Information” in the art magazine Afterall, and then reappeared in a condensed form as Naive Set Theory (via Dexter Sinister). In both he unpacks the strange balance of knowing and not knowing in the experience of art objects, their inherent calls and answers, conceptual pushes and pulls etc. But not as binary as the words might make it sound, he’s trying to locate a much more 3D or 360 space of aliveness. I mean, can something even be knowable and unknowable at the same time? The answer is of course: yes. But how?
Sarat Maharaj gets a little closer as he 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… that while you look at these lamps and experience joining them, that you resist attempting to place them in that static illusion of identity and memories which is made of everything we call “self”…
I wish I had time and space to unpack Eastern philosophy’s teachings on “not self” aka “no self” aka “mistaken self” but I don’t so, hopefully you have some sense of them? It’s a hard thing to grasp but important. What finally made some sense to me was a story told by one of my favorite teachers, Dr. Larry Ward: “If you like a type of flowering tree, and it’s spring, you remember that this tree is flowering as you see one down the block a bit. You look forward to it. And as you get close, the intensity grows. The smell becomes impossible to avoid. You can’t ignore it. You become it and it becomes you. It overwhelms. But as you try to hold it, it’s out of reach. You can’t do anything but experience it. You can’t possess it. You can’t share it with your friend who wasn’t there. And as you walk past, getting further away, the smell lessens. Becomes a memory. Then part of an ocean of memories.” Where did that smell go? What is it now? To me, the self is a lot like that.
Part 4: If the universe is always expanding, we are too, right?
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 of 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.
In the end, it’s easy to find a good lamp.
