hese images lie at the intersection of illusion with reality. They explore my own experience of home and family in intimate psycho-social spaces that are private and partially concealed from view. Pasts-remembered and futures-imagined merge into present image moments. Dark patinas of times-past stain interior walls, imprinting each one with its own separate sense of presence; the vestiges of people who once lived.
I photograph a circa 1900 dollhouse that measures three feet high by four feet wide by three feet deep. I use a variety of lenses, perspectives, and lighting techniques to create a sense that the rooms are "real" but at the same time disturbingly "not-real".
When these images were published last year in Eyemazing (www.eyemazing.com), I thought the reviewer, Heather Snyder, truly captured the essence of this body of work: "... [he] uses a place to portray something other than itself, something that hints at, implies, or conjures ideas that can be removed from the concrete idea of place… the emotions, memories, and intangible sensations evoked by this place, are what give it a distinct presence."
...Eric L Hansen
Eric L Hansen's color images are deeply personal storyboards of his own connections to post-modern American culture. Reviewers have found his work "...distinctive; a new voice, highly conceptual" (Rock Hushka, Tacoma Art Museum), "... compelling, a kind of first-person social anthropology" (Alan Rapp, Chronicle Books), "... at once fascinating and horrifying... I experience a jumble of emotions" (Jeanne Friscia, San Francisco Camerawork), "... the experience is real, the nostalgia evoked is felt, and the meaning of this [work] reaches us somewhere other than in our immediate, rational consciousness," (Heather Snyder writing for Eyemazing, #2-2006).
Museum curators who have lauded his work include: Director of the Museum of Photographic Art Arthur Ollman, Director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art Robert Fitzpatrick, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts Laura Addison, Curator of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art Joann Moser, Director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Marc Pachter, and Associate Curator of LA's Museum of Contemporary Art Alma Ruiz.
In the last five years, his work has been curated in more than twenty group shows and two solo exhibitions. Last year, his work was featured in the spring issue of Eyemazing, an international fine art photography journal published in the Netherlands and distributed in the United States through museum bookstores such as MOMA and MOCA. His body of work Dollhouse is presented this year at the George Billis LA gallery in Culver City, California.
Eric began making photographs at the age of 12, and while he later studied drawing and painting, photography remains his enduring passion. He earned a BFA degree at Rutgers in creative writing and theatre: acting, directing, stage lighting, and set design... the art of telling a story with actors, color, light, shadow and space.
These aesthetics inform his Social Narrative Cycles, presently five bodies of work: Plantation, Days of the Apocalypse, Dreams of the Drug Dealer's Daughter, The Intimacy Project, and his current undertaking, Dollhouse. While acknowledging a debt to photojournalists like Cartier-Bresson, his work is more compositionally intentional, after Cezanne, and darkly expressionist, as Schiele and Kokoschka. Some of his images are painful; some are joyous; some are funny. All are provocative in deep color, shadow and light.
From seeing to printing, Eric produces each piece himself, releasing large-format C- prints in editions of eleven or less. He works from his southern California studio in Long Beach.
