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| To Sleep,
Perchance to Dream |
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Up untill a few months ago, a typical work by Toronto painter/sculptor
Mike Hansen consisted of two or more thick, eccentrically shaped,
slab-like canvases slathered with an absurdly appetizing coating of
encaustic (pigment suspended in wax), and monted close together on the
wall. Sometimes they looked like giant slices of Gorgonzola. The works
hung suspended somewhere between painting and sculpture, uneasy, it always
seemed to me, about being either. Now, while keeping the old dependence
(for the most part) on the doubleness of his pieces, Hansen has made an
appearently whimisical but ultimately decisive breakthrough: The encaustic
is gone, and the shaped canvases are now covered with satiny ticking. They
resemble mattresses that, for some reason, have been sliced and bent into
wonkey mini-mattresses shaped like commas or chunky buterfly wings, or
half of a valentine. Each work is isolated on a square of pastel-painted
wall at Toronto's Lonsdale Gallery, together forming an
installation
called, cunningly, Beauty Rest. Given the big boost of new meaning
afforded him by the switch from canvas to mattress, Hansen sees the
exhibition, no doubt correctly as addressing questions relating to our
needs for comfort and solace, and how those needs are medicated and
perhaps compromised by comerce's desire to sell us dreams money can buy:
all that seductive tufeting, all those bland but opulent flowers printed
on it, that clean, orderly piping all around the edges - fences around the
field of dream!
Gary Michael Dault
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 28, 2000
"To sleep, perchance to dream"
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