Feast of Famine? It's newsletter time!

http:// www.susanhenselprojects.com

I DWELL IN IMPOSSIBILITY

October 25-December 1, 2019

The Phipps Center for the Arts

109 Locust St.

Hudson, WI

Gallery Hours daily 9am-4:30 pm (Sunday noon-4:30 pm)

IT'S A CELEBRATION! COME JOIN ME! MEET MY SON JOHN, THE

PHOTOGRAPHER!

The opening reception and celebration is Friday, October 25, 6:30-8:30pm

Put it on your calendar!

I am so pleased to share this with you. The collaborative suite of photographs, I DWELL IN IMPOSSIBILITY, that my son John and I worked on, is about to be exhibited in its entirety for the second time on roughly five years, and he is flying in from Boston to be at the opening!

John is a powerful artist and thinker in his own right. We have collaborated before

and would more often,I suspect, if Boston weren't so far away! The idea for this

began many years ago while I was at a residency in Illinois. I wondered what it meant

when a woman wore a "power suit." Time passed, I aged and I wondered what would

it mean if a grey-haired woman, with a "pregnant belly" wore a "power suit?"

As luck would have it, I had shoulder surgery and John flew out to check up on me.

We talked some more about the idea. He costumed me, I took my drugs and he

directed me. The photoshoot brought out all kinds of dissonances concerning age,

gender and power.

It has been a very successful group of artworks. Portions of this suite have been

exhibited all across the country.

Do come and meet him and say "HI" to me as well.

The reception and celebration is Friday, October 25, 6:30-8:30pm

_____________________________________

In Other News

Feast or famine; Flood or drought.

That is the way of the art world. You send out failing proposals, rejection after

rejection seemingly forever. And then the dam breaks and you are overwhelmed with

opportunities for exhibition. The studio is at "flood stage" right now!

TORUS INTERIOR is being exhibited at

the Art League of Rhode Island, in One-Zero-One

HEATWAVE is on exhibit at the

Farmington Museum, in Farmington New Mexico

CASCADE is on exhibit at the St. Louis Art

Guild, as part of the Surface Design Association shows.

HORIZON is featured in the Surface

Design Association Journal

SKEWED GEOMETRY is at Webster

University as part of the Surface Design Association festivities.

And, by the time you see me again, I will be a "Certified Ricoma Technician." But,

please, do not try to hire me! I am taking an intensive course on maintaining and

repairing my new commercial embroidery machine!

Hope to see you soon.

I

In The Windows- Geometric Events!

 GEOMETRIC EVENTS
by
Susan Hensel

A single stitch is made by stretching a thread between two holes. The line formed by it can be loose or tight. It can be thick or thin, depending on the diameter of the thread. It can be long or so short that it barely exists. But, it can never exist as more than a single defined geometric event, a sort of singularity. The combinations of these singularities create planes, lines, forms, and geometrical space.

Since recieving a Jerome Foundation Project Grant for Textile Art in 2014, my intense media focus has been on digitizing for machine embroidery. The process is highly technical, using several software packages that can only be described as a non‑intuitive cross between Photoshop and Illustrator.

Digital embroidery lends itself to the study of geometry.  The combination of high tech with "women's work" provides a delicious contrast of hard/soft, nostalgic/current, objective/non-objective. It also lends itself to modular repetition and re-combinations. Themes can be played out quickly in the computer and then stitched and sampled oh so slowly on the machine; combined with and without mixed media in a wide-ranging exploration of forms in space.  

In this chaotic time, digital textiles seem like a way to begin to bring order to the world. Order is, however, always unstable, a glimmer of a hope, cut off by random acts of chance or intent. It is no different in digital embroidery.  In the computer, all things seem orderly, put together, and logical... as though the human propensity for chaos did not exist.  In the production, chance operates: human error, flawed thread, broken needles, run out bobbins, high humidity, low humidity, fabric popping out of hoops and the panicked phone call from a friend.  Repair savvy, canny attention and a spirit of wabi sabi is essential.

INVENTORY METHODS, in the WINDOWS

INVENTORY METHODS, by Susan Hensel

QR code to take the survey

Gideon stands guard

Gideon wonders what I am up to

INVENTORY METHODS

Preparing to install 160 tubes

Preparing to install

INVENTORY METHODS : do the math.

Inventory Methods is an artwork about accretion and subtraction; accumulation and reduction.

It is a record of old pajamas discarded as useless and accumulated as rags.

It is a record of weights, each tube containing 4 ounces of waste materials: rags.

It is a declaration of the beauty that remains in the devalued, worn, discarded.

It is a record of an ongoing process of reduction and a questioning of the nature of what, and who, we devalue and discard.

Each tube represent 4 ounces of weight lost: a reduction in body size, a quest for health and a consideration of the pressures on bodies to conform to cultural standards. 

Gaining and losing weight is very public.  Unless one hides away from the eyes of others, the process is subject to value judgments, comment, encouragement, discouragement, vilification. That which is intensely private and personal, becomes a public spectacle, subject to comment.

With this artwork I want to direct the commenting process, developing community conversation at the intersection of numbers and beauty. I will use a QR code to bring people into an active commenting process.

When did curves become unacceptable?   When did fat cease to represent wealth and fertility?  When did advanced age become frail and disrespected?  When did age, weight, beauty and numbers begin to intersect with moral judgements?

As I lost weight, I wanted to mark the progress, but also name as beautiful that which was subtracted.  I accumulated art as I reduce my size.

There are 160 tubes.  Do the math.

Take a survey to add language to INVENTORY METHODS

IN the Windows, December 2013

I have always had some problems managing calendars.  I get lost in the days of the week, the months and their corresponding number systems.  For the most part I do get to all my appointments on the right day and at the right time.  But there are glitches.  December is such a month, a glitch month.  I created an unintentional hole in the window schedule.  So, at the last minute, I had to fill the windows.  So this month the work in the windows is mine.

 

These deconstructed suits are part of a series that keeps me thinking and re-working, over and over.

 
I keep returning to them, adding pins, skeletal structures of thread.  I ponder the deconstruction of a symbol of power.

Deconstructing Power

One of the many things that women share world wide is wage disparity with men.  In the US, the average gender wage gap, is 23%.  When considering the wages of CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, the gap narrows to 17%, but the number of women holding the position also reduces.  Women are roughly 51% of the population in  the US, holding 4.2% of the top positions in Fortune 500 companies.

What is it, then, that represents this overwhelming male power?  Perhaps it is the suit.

Deconstructing Power is a series of stitched assemblages that consider the artificiality of the power suit, designed to enhance male images of power. Developed out of European styles of the aristocracy, the power suit, once established, changed little and now is the near ubiquitous symbol of power for the urban male.  The deconstructed suits are stitched onto floral/feminine upholstery fabrics with their artifice prominent. Once splayed open, they become simply the stuff of which they are made: cleverly woven textiles cleverly assembled for effect, often by the hands of women.

A not so lackadaisical summer

Summer is finally upon us.  It is a glorious Independence Day morning, not yet hot.  The birds are singing and the flowers swaying in the breeze. The amateur fireworks have been pretty minimal this year. But tonight will be a different story. The skies will light up with both amateur and professional fireworks.

Last week we lit up the night with words and thoughts about HOME.  We had a one night garden party...that moved inside as more storms, in a stormy summer, moved through the Twin Cities.

Rosemary Davis organized a reading of Minnesota authors:  HOMETOWN: A Language We speak.

Environmental artist, Alis Olsen, installed two sculptures in the side garden.

Julia Jackson Hunt installed text work in the windows.

A special gallery note:  as you can see in the first photo above, I am still in a sling from an accident and surgery.  Recovery is slow...perhaps another 4 months.  As a consequence of needing to schedule physical therapy, Monday hours are suspended for the rest of the summer.  The Windows on Cedar Project continues.  Next up is Marjorie Nilssen.   If you need wool products: hand dyed roving, mohair and handspun yarn....I am still around.  Feel free to call or email to set up an appointment.

Ophelia as she is changing in the new temporary studio

Ophelia Ascendant

I have rented a storefront on S. Bloomington Avenue for the duration of the renovation through Reader's Art so I can easily continue working on the bodies of work that have been languishing in the on and off work practice that was necessitated by life with a gallery.Each day that I get to work on this project, I come home exhausted after only a few hours of work.  So much looking!

 I try one thing and then another and look at the whole series of 10 drawings to see if they scan, if they tell the story that they have been created to tell.











 Little by little, they accomplish their work.





Each drawing is part of an installation and performance that I expect to present aroun this time next year.  I could do it sooner...except for Reader's Art!