Closing Reception & Performance: Saturday, May 4, 5:00–7:00 pm

Dana Hemenway’s works run right up to the edge of design and functional objects for the home. Some of her sculptures can be mounted to the wall and used as illumination in the home, but command more attention than a light fixture, drawing us into their sculptural forms. She builds shapes that she inserts bulbs through and between spaces in her hand-bulit ceramics. Other works are table sculptures with light protruding through the bottom of the table, a visible wand of light. 

Her work is minimal and formal in many ways, and reveals her hand on close looking. Her glazes, and strange, attached textures and flakes quietly move us away from seeing the pieces as mass produced and lead us to see them as one of a kind, with a bit of wonkiness left-over from the history of a hand making each part.

Maggie Haas, on Dana Hemenway: 
Describing the material world is a difficult proposition. I’ve been told negative space reveals positive space, in a game of opposites. But what about, rather than space, the edges of the thing? Can you trace its contours, rather than describe the matter of the thing, or the antimatter of its opposite?

Addressing hierarchies in architecture, art, and craft, Dana Hemenway’s work doesn’t offer a mirror image of her subjects. In Endless…, she approaches her concerns obliquely— sometimes at a literal 90°— as ceiling fixture elements and rug-like textures make their way to the wall. Handbuilt clay forms take on structural roles, recalling steel and concrete, or veer into chunky, eclectic patterns. Woven and pierced intersections connect materials in gestures that nod to textiles and organic growth. Hardware and bare lightbulbs are close to the viewer and unshaded, more material than illumination.

Bilaterally or radially symmetrical, the works evoke architectural columns, figures, lamp bases, and even strands of DNA. Looking around, I recall the word “spandrel,” the architectural term for ornamental gaps between structural elements. Goth arches, for example, have mirrored spandrels at their peaks. In the 1970s spandrel was applied as a metaphor for accidental biological traits— ones that evolve as the byproduct, rather than direct outcome, of adaptations. Biologists hypothesize that the human chin, with or without its little cleft, appeared when our jaws evolved.

Spandrels are pure visual potential, necessary extra space. They are part of a structure, part of a body, but not its core. They point back to the form or function they adorn or conceal. Navigating gaps in our effort to understand architectural spaces, designed objects, and our own lineages, we extrapolate. Hemenway tells me she had Constantin Brâncuși’s columns on her mind as she worked. His Infinite Column or Endless Column stretches skyward in a series of identical rhomboid units. They’re not literally endless, but even without the benefit of the title, I can imagine them stacking one by one to infinity. Rather than calling up an endless line of repeated blocks, Hemenway's columnar structures are threaded and permeable. Her patterns are a succession rather than a duplication. Leaving her techniques so visible, she makes the assembly of her work legible, something I can mentally continue ad-infinitum. 

The units that make up Hemenway’s work are individuals, analogs, but also mimics, morphing copies. They’re visual artifacts of old structures, functions and decorations. Oscillating between industrial and organic materials and patterns, Hemenway traces lineages of sculptural and craft forms.  Spandrels reveal their supporting structures, their related essential traits. New technologies develop but are designed to fit into old fixtures and formats. An LED tube shaped like earlier fluorescent lights. A curl of a baby’s first lock of hair, like a grandparent’s cowlick. Hand-built stoneware glazed like successive generations of paint on concrete. None of these things are fundamental: they’re surface and insubstantial. They point at the underlying thing, the invention, the craft, the genesis, the repair. But in the language of metaphor, they are clear. They are the contours of essential things, hinting at what was before, what is inside.

Maggie Haas is an artist and writer in San Francisco.

Eleanor Harwood Gallery