Artist asks others to remake her father’s art
When Manhattan-based filmmaker Sarah Hanssen tried to find a gallery in New York City to host her art show, she struck out because the work is not for sale.
But Hanssen also has roots in the Hudson Valley. One day, while picking up her children at the Beacon train station, she walked up the hill, discovered the Distortion Society gallery and reached out to director Michelle Silver.
Several works in the resulting exhibit, Two Things Are True, are bright and upbeat, although they belie a dark backstory. The title is open to interpretation, but for Hanssen, it refers to her troubled relationship with her father. “On one hand, I had an affection and admiration for him, but he is also the person who is the source of the greatest pain in my life,” she says.
Her father, who drew and painted, never broke through in the art world and died in 2011, leaving a legacy of child sexual abuse. Hanssen inherited dozens of his pieces and put some on her walls. But in a moment of clarity, she decided to stop “keeping up the lie and running away from the true shame that dominated our relationship,” she says.
At that instant, she sought to transform the works as part of her healing process and found more than 50 artists, including friends of friends, to carry out the task as word-of-mouth spread.
Hanssen imposed no mandates and granted each participant full creative license. She’s documenting her story in a film and plans to hold a larger show later this year.
Hanssen presented 30 works for Silver’s consideration, culled to 16 pieces that fit into the modest gallery space, which is connected to a tattoo parlor. “She inspires me,” says Silver, who co-curated the show. “We hit it off and just made it happen.”
It is easy to view the father’s original work with a jaundiced eye, and some of the artists expressed contempt. Some works remain intact, including a hyper-abstract of heavy brush dabs accented with flecks of color, the dominant hue being brown. Another one piles dark green oil paint like a grotesque layer of frosting on a cake.
Several artists altered the originals with a light hand. Candice Smith Corby superimposed a vase containing two withered flowers over a diagonal rainbow-striped design. For her contribution, “Sarah,” Cecilia Vazquez added a silhouette of a rose to an untouched painting on paper.
“Nature’s Spirit,” from Gemma Bailey, who lives in Beacon, is colorful and upbeat, although the project came to her while navigating her own relationship to trauma and healing. “I wanted the piece to be taken over by new life, overgrown and chaotic, but as the flowers bloom, the sadness of the older piece [faintly visible in the background] fades away,” she writes in the exhibit program.
Many artists made the original works unrecognizable. Joanna Muehleisen cut a painting into long strips, immersing them in hot water and winding the pieces into a small ball. In “Push On,” Megan Prince chopped up a work, turning it into a sculpture of coiled spools that resembles a Medusa wig.
Finnish artist John Ringhofer took three paintings on paper and constructed a simulated reel-to-reel tape recorder. The material representing the tape is a strip ripped from one of the pieces and cut at a splicing block. A red-and-white, horseshoe-shaped magnet beneath the spools is intended to “neutralize/demagnetize the energy contained in Sarah’s father’s original artwork,” he writes.
Now that the stigma surrounding mental health issues is fading, many artists are sharing their stories and discovering the power of creativity.
“My work as a painter and artist has a lot to do with mental health and trauma,” says Silver. “People get tattoos to deal with grief over a death or a new transition in life. Art is a healing mechanism, and it seemed special to take that theme into the gallery.”
Distortion Society, at 155 Main St. in Beacon, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Friday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, or by appointment. Two Things Are True continues through Jan. 31. See distortionsociety.com.
