The back room at Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea had a show of works by Al Hansen. I hadn’t heard of him, or so I thought, but I loved the works. The room was full of female totems and female-obsessed works. There were fetish/torsos like this one, made of cigarette filters, that were great objects. There were also collage-maps made of cut up Hershey’s chocolate wrappers. The logo was cut up into Her’s and She’s and Yes’s and Hey’s and the whole thing was a weirdly wonderful obsessive playland full of Western-made but African-feeling totems. The guard stopped me from taking pictures after I took two, here’s the one, and at flickr is a shot of the Hershey’s map of Africa.
My flickr pal Timothy B. Buckwalter reminded me that Al Hansen is musician Beck Hansen‘s grandfather. I remember reading about how Beck and his grandfather had a two-person show of their art a while back. If Beck’s art is anything like this it’s good. His music is good anyway.
