All sizes fit one

The visual forms of Alan Corkery Hahn and Belinda Hanson that come together at their current two-person show at 1078 Gallery range in scale from rather tiny to positively over-sized. The attending emotional textures the artworks provoke or inspire similarly range from understated to forceful. The two artists did not know each other before being placed together by the gallery’s curating team for the Hahn + Hanson exhibition, and yet their works emerge here as beautifully suited to one another.

Hahn, an artist who has shown extensively in Chico and the Pacific Northwest, offers an impressive number of small-scale works that seem to explore the complicated qualities and habits of varied modern life.

A proliferation of pieces lines the walls, with a long series of small images pinned carefully in place. Hahn works in the suggestive terrain of craft, needling shapes into the pulp of paper with thread. Some forms are blockier and heavier than others as the line shifts with the imprecise process of stitching. While each object depicted retains integrity, each doesn’t exactly appear sturdy or solid either. In shape they are somewhat reminiscent of the early instructional works of Fluxus artists like Ay-o or Yoko Ono, pieces that instructed viewers toward a task such as cutting along a line of an image and proceeding to do something useful with the result, often in very simple terms.

Hahn’s chosen subjects here are suggestive of something that could be cut or that has the potential to cut: bonsai plants, teeth. Or alternatively, tools for repairing or holding items: a sharpener, a box. In the case of the piece “Ribbon” the item is one that that could bind separate items together.

Interested in the processes and consequences of art’s materials and labors, Hahn pushes the viewer to consider what sorts of worlds we make with each small gesture, be it the click of a button on a joystick or the turning of a page of a book in our hands. With the piece “Cable,” we see an interest in connections, and with the series of “Wishbones” a question of what is possible when the sinew of a connection is forced to break. Hahn’s occupation with these objects being put together or pulled apart is always thoughtful, and presented in a visual language gently charming.

Filling the space of the gallery are Hanson’s sculptural installations. In some works Hanson explicitly references the Duchampian readymade by using the stool shape of Duchamp’s famous work “Bicycle Wheel.” But Hanson modifies the form and intent of Dadaist art by applying her own handmade practice to the pieces. The stool is applied a treatment of being sawed in half and presented in a grid form. Multiples of broken-in-half stools are painted sky blue and pushed up against the wall, becoming a physical embodiment of an enigmatic equation in “Half-Assed Stools.”

In “Enough,” Hanson incorporates a chair but also a piece of fruit that can be intervened and reached for, then potentially truly eaten by the viewer. Dialoguing with minimalism via Dada, the interaction of the the viewer’s body with the pieces is essential to their process. Perhaps this becomes most clear with the work “Swing Tree Swing,” a sculpture that hangs over an enlarged photographic Google map of clear cuts made in the canyons of Northern California. A social concern for the fate of local landscape is arrived at through this map of clear-cut trees, but also through the placement of a viewer’s body cascading over the photographic evidence in real-time. Hanson incorporates the viewing body in a manner that is playful but not jarringly at odds with the gravity of her subject matter.

What should be cut? What moves should one make? What kind of world can we inhabit individually and collectively? Hahn and Hanson sift through these questions in surprising and generous ways in this rich exhibition.