My Love Life (Detail), 2005, Installation at Johnson County Community College, Overland park, Kansas

My Love Life (Detail), 2005, Installation at Johnson County Community College, Overland park, Kansas

My Love Life

Kind of like Morrissey, Erik Hanson adapts his diaristic practice into curious configurations. Here, it's a pathway in a park of his making in which hand-carved signposts and clusters of tree trunks delineate an idiosyncratic memoir of past loves. Each sign bears a recollection, or confession, in the form of a singer and a song, corresponding to a particular former relationship: "Nico Singing All Tomorrow's Parties." Circling every sign is a gathering of logs and each, upon close inspection, bears an inscription much more elaborate and telling than initials carved in a tree. Hanson's carefully modeled knotty birch exteriors meld with black resin interiors; and where the rings of a tree, showing its age, would normally be, he has faintly drawn the grooves and labels of albums and singles. Hanson's marks of love remembered are drawn records that coincide, for the artist, with the music that drew each of his loved ones toward him.

In his unapologetic devotion to music, Hanson divulges tastes ranging from the embarrassment of pop to the obscurity of connoisseurship--making his divulged choices the elemental systems of his work. He seeks to organize the immeasurable emotions attached to songs as they intersect with personal experience, making signposts that mark particular times, places, and feelings. Using a combination of inert materials (of culture) and organic forms (of nature) is characteristic of his visual translation of the everyday experience of listening to music into various structured, material utterances--drawings, paintings, sculpture, needlepoint--whatever medium can serve to embody his memory as it lodged itself to a song. My Love Life expands such contingencies by situating the most show-bizzy of culture, "Shirley Bassey Singing Something," into his invented state park nature. Citing a particular performance of an unlikely cover version, this sign could hint, much like his formal choices, at opposites attracting.

Lia Gangitano