Becoming a Horse

Five Car Garage - 2018

Hansen’s sculpture and installation work in Becoming a Horse explores transformations: psychological, physical, and material, against the backdrop of the American West. Using the desert landscape as language to explore gender, her work delves into archetypes of female and animal imagery and explores ideas of female domestication and wildness. Becoming a Horse draws inspiration from the short story Horse, by Amy Bonnaffons, in which two women attempt very different transformations. One wants to become a mother; the other wants to become a horse. Bonnaffon’s characters do away with social constraints, via the seemingly contradictory but necessary task of cultivating wildness and instinct.

Hansen’s sculptures are built from emblematic bones of the desert – dry, abandoned objects with potential to be fleshed out again. In the desert tradition of assemblage, Hansen’s densely fabricated sculptures embrace the clumsy, lop-sided, eccentric nature of transformation. References to exploring and escaping one’s body emerge and throughout the show.

Becoming a Horse also features several of Hansen’s text-based quilts, which similarly explore and escape the space in which they are supposed to exist. Letter forms move back and forth between abstraction and narration. The quilts themselves expand beyond a traditional rectilinear format and echo organic forms. Spray painted lines, clothing remnants and architectural fragments are collaged together with quilted elements, mimicking the patched-together-nature of Mojave Desert ghost houses. Aesthetics of loss and abandonment sit comfortably alongside a wild pallet of colors, neon lights and expressive lines, like a type of alert acceptance.