Oscar Tuazon & Eli Hansen
April 16, 2008

A pair of two-man (two-brother, to be precise) exhibits explore temporary shelters, found objects, and utopian architecture. One: An installation at Seattle Art Museum, where Oscar Tuazon previously won the 2007 Betty Bowen award. Curated by Michael Darling, this show is the first in a promising new series, “Next,” with a focus on underappreciated Northwest artists. Two: More object-oriented work is on view at Howard House (opening Thurs. April 17), as well as site-specific installation pieces, including a structure constructed out of six-sided glass bottles. Today, you could hit both. Visit Howard House at noon Saturday to hear the artists discuss their collaborative work. And then head to SAM to catch a peek at their parallel installation. Howard House, 604 Second Ave., 256-6399, www.howardhouse.net. Free. Artists Talk: Saturday, April 19, noon. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, www.seattleartmuseum.org. ADRIANA GRANT
Thu., April 17, noon; Sat., April 19, noon, 2008

http://www.seattleweekly.com

Dynamic duo: Artist brothers with Tacoma ties capture worldwide attention
ROSEMARY PONNEKANTI; rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
Published: April 13th, 2008 01:00 AM | Updated: April 14th, 2008 07:33 AM
On the face of it, the two brothers couldn’t be more different. Eli Hansen is burly. Oscar Tuazon is rangy. Hansen has red-blond curls; Tuazon has lanky black hair. Hansen’s a technically savvy glassblower; Tuazon is an artist more interested in philosophical possibilities.

Yet the two brothers fuse their styles and knowledge into collaborative art that has, in just the last six months, fascinated the Seattle art world. Described as “difficult,” “anti-beauty” and “exciting,” their work mixes Hansen’s glass with Tuazon’s found objects in a do-it-yourself, Northwest aesthetic that results in sculpture and installations like the ones showing this month at Seattle Art Museum, Western Bridge and Howard House.

But it’s taken Seattle a while to discover the pair – despite the fact that they live (or in Tuazon’s case, used to live) right here in Tacoma.

“We’ve been doing projects together all our lives,” says Hansen, taking a fresh coffee cake out of his oven in his South Tacoma home. “First building forts and all that, then making Super-8 films, even homemade tattoo guns.”

The brothers grew up on the Port Madison reservation on the Kitsap Peninsula with mother Anna Linzey and father John Hansen, both bookbinders. When their parents divorced, the brothers spent their high school years with their father in Port Townsend, after which separate paths put a temporary end to their projects together.

MAKE-IT-YOURSELF PHILOSOPHY

Hansen’s house looks like project central. In the front yard, tinkered bits of bicycles line the fence. Inside, the kitchen holds the aftermath of what looks like an all-night cooking session. A tiny workshop room is littered with tools, glass art, miniature sculpture models. The living room is full of Hansen and Tuazon’s preparations for a trip to Alaska’s Kodiak region, to build a house in the wilderness as part of their Seattle Art Museum installation opening next weekend.

The house is also a perfect manifestation of Hansen’s part of the collaborative duo: the messily practical. A glassblower, Hansen, 29, has been well-known in Tacoma glass circles since he moved here in 2005. He’s a part-time gaffer and occasional visiting artist at the Museum of Glass Hot Shop and Mobile Hot Shop, and teaches and shows at Tacoma Glassblowing Studio. He’s worked with Dale Chihuly. Yet as well as making glass art, he also epitomizes the Northwest DIY ethic, as handy with a welder as with a blowpipe.

“We both design, but what I do is produce the work, the material,” says Hansen.

Tuazon, on the other hand, has spent more time in New York and Paris apartments than in Tacoma workshops. The elder brother at 32, is as tall as Hansen but lean and rangy. His black collar-length hair works with his black clothes and red Nike high-tops for an off-the-wall look. Tuazon left Port Townsend for a couple of years of study in the late ’90s at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, followed by the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Then he spent some time in the New York art scene: showing architecture-influenced installations in galleries, retooling a ’70s anti-terrorist magazine at a Whitney Biennial, working with film artist Matthew Barney. (Tuazon also was briefly married, taking his wife’s last name.)

Around 2004, Tuazon began showing in Europe, where he’s represented by galleries in Oslo and Paris. But in 2006, tired of New York (“It’s a blockbuster scene, a fantasy world,” he says). Tuazon turned up at Hansen’s door in Tacoma. He soon got work at the Museum of Glass, including designing the exhibition “Mining Glass,” and the two brothers began working on projects in earnest.

“My way is (using) whatever’s available, a kind of bricolage,” says Tuazon, of his part in the process. Shopping at “Goodwill is a major part of our collaboration.”

The result is an original mix of the highly crafted and the mundane. Cut crystal or blown glass nestles in plywood boxes made by the brothers’ father; handmade windows sit near a log. The whole thing is highly seasoned by both a philosophical liking for self-sufficiency in the manner of neo-hippie forest dwellers, geodesic domes and the like – plus what Hansen calls “the Northwest school of make-it-yourself,” picked up from their childhood on the reservation.

GETTING DISCOVERED

After Tuazon moved to Tacoma, the Northwest art world gradually discovered the brothers. In 2006, Tuazon contributed to a zine-style publication for artists for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Art critic Matthew Stadler took note, and introduced Tuazon to Eric Fredericksen, who curates the Seattle nonprofit art space Western Bridge. Fredericksen then curated the brothers’ work in a spring 2007 show at the Bodgers’ and Kludgers’ cooperative gallery in Vancouver, B.C. One of the show’s visitors was Michael Darling, modern art curator for the Seattle Art Museum.

Suddenly the Seattle ball got rolling. The next day, Darling showed up to buy a Hansen/Tuazon piece for SAM: “Crystal Math,” a sculpture involving a cut-crystal dome inside a plywood box and another – looking like a leftover drug apparatus – on top of it. Darling also invited the brothers to plan a SAM show for April 2008, says Hansen, and meanwhile recommended Tuazon to the committee deciding SAM’s prestigious Betty Bowen art award for a high-achieving Northwest artist. Tuazon won the award in October.

All of a sudden, Seattle gallerists were on the phone asking to see the brothers’ work. Billy Howard, owner of Howard House gallery, was one of them, booking the pair for two sculptures at Aqua Art Miami exhibit last December (one sold) and for a duo show this month.

Finally, Fredericksen decided to include them in Western Bridge’s April group show, with Seattle collectors Bill and Ruth True commissioning a new work. The brothers have gone from being quietly unknown to three Seattle shows in one month: celebrity status.

“It’s smart, brave, going forward,” says Darling of the brothers’ work. “I like how it has real Northwest flavor, but still suggesting a new model to making art in the Northwest.”

Says Howard: “It has raw energy. I like the quality of their work, unlike anything I’ve seen or represented in my gallery. There’s a mystery to it.”

LIVING BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Mystery sums up Hansen and Tuazon’s work, in a way. It’s hard to pin the brothers down, for instance, on what exactly will be in the SAM exhibition. It’ll explore ideas of wilderness, inaccessibility, and, says Hansen, “building what you can with what you have.”

Part one is the Kodiak trip, where the brothers and two friends will fly and boat themselves to a remote location armed with fiberglass, ropes, a chain saw and a mill, and attempt to build themselves a house. The SAM installation will reflect the concept: a log, a wall, a handmade glass window, handmade lanterns, white space. Photos and film from the Kodiak expedition will round it out.

“It’ll look unfinished – the ad hoc, ‘almost got it done’ Northwest thing,” explains Hansen. “We’re trying to explain the drives that people get. It’s a city’s interpretation of an outdoor space.”

The Howard House show, meanwhile, will revisit the childhood projects in an exploration of brotherhood. Tattoo guns Hansen taught Tuazon to make at age 13 (the tattoos are still there on each man’s wrists), the Super-8 films, a wall of the glass bottles they’d started five years ago. The whole thing, says Hansen, tries to get inside the feeling of living between two worlds. It’s something the brothers experienced growing up between races in Indianola, what Hansen calls the “white guys side” of the reservation, but is equally applicable to the opposition of nature and industry in the Northwest, or between the pragmatic glass industry and the high-flown art world.

At Western Bridge, the work will be a development of a subversively nonfunctioning telescope the two made for Aqua Art Miami. This time, it’s a periscope, with mirrors made by Hansen. Unlike regular periscopes, though, the mirrors will be framelessly suspended at exact points around the room, requiring viewer participation to see the end point.

Says Hansen: “Art is representational, making an object into an idea. That’s what we’re addressing.”

For all of these projects, Hansen and Tuazon are now creating them from different continents. Tuazon married a French woman last October, and they live in Paris with their baby daughter, named – of all things – Tacoma. Since then, Tuazon visits Tacoma only occasionally, and the collaborations have been done via e-mail photos and a staggeringly high phone bill.

Hansen says it works only because they’re brothers: “We have this innate ability to communicate.”

MIXED RECEPTION LOCALLY

Not everyone in the Northwest loves Hansen and Tuazon, however. Their work is notably absent from all recent biennials at the Tacoma Art Museum, either individually or together, and at the Museum of Glass, their only work now visible is Hansen’s commercially created items in the shop.

TAM senior curator Rock Hushka, who handles Northwest and contemporary art, sees showing the brothers’ work in their own town as a difficult sell.

“I find their work similar to stuff in the Whitney Biennial, where there’s a different aesthetic – almost anti-beauty,” says Hushka. “TAM hasn’t begun to grapple with that concept. But as internationally renowned artists, I hope we’ll see them soon.”

Scott Lawrimore, who runs hip Seattle art space Lawrimore Project, is also less than enthusiastic. He was one of the gallerists who called up Tuazon after the Betty Bowen but was beaten to the post by Howard.

All he’s seen of the pair’s work is the small collection of grungy photographs and taped-together broken glass domes that SAM put up near the elevator after the Bowen award.

“The work at SAM right now is pretty opaque,” Lawrimore says. “Their ideas look good on paper … but I’m looking forward to being relieved of my ignorance.”

Even with a mixed reception, the Northwest is a scene the brothers are pleased to be involved with.

“There’s something very exciting about the arts scene between Vancouver and Portland in a way that’s completely unique,” says Tuazon. “What’s cool about the Northwest right now is that a lot of people have very interesting projects, they’re passionate, they have community spirit. It’s more genuine than a world based on selling big artwork.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

What: “Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen: This world’s just not real to me”

When: Thursday through May 31; 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays

Where: Howard House, 604 Second Ave., Seattle

Admission: Free

Information: 206-256-6392, www.howardhouse.net

What: “SAM Next: Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon”

When: Saturday through Oct. 5; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays

Where: Seattle Art Museum, third floor, 1300 First Ave., Seattle

Related Event: Artists’ gallery talk, 11 a.m. Saturday

Admission: $7-$13, free for 12 and younger, free on first Thursdays

Information: 206-654-3100, www.seattleartmuseum.org