MARY Margaret hansen
FINDING OUR WAY
ECHOME
May 13 – June 17, 2023
Echome is an amalgamation of images that have enchanted the artist for decades:
Neolithic stone circles and mounds, vine covered buildings, mussel and oyster shells, women's portraits, open doorways, faded flowers, overripe fruit, and beach pebbles.
Mary Margaret Hansen is a visual artist, writer, photographer, and inveterate blogger. For 50+ years, she’s held a camera lens over her left eye and her fingers on a keyboard, telling stories with both images and prose. Her series, Finding Our Way, a post-feminist project created with her friend, fellow photographer Patsy Cravens, has been exhibited in numerous locations in Texas. Four works from the series are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Hansen has shown work in solo and group exhibitions in venues across America, produced site-specific installations in Houston and Marfa, and served as lead artist for a City of Houston public art project. Her passions are printing photographs from negatives, assembling photo collages, and crafting personal essays with a memoir in mind. Not a day goes by that she does not look for connections between and among images and words.
A tab lo’, a photographic installation, opened at Heidi Vaughan Fine Art in June 2020.
“Any object or image is, in my mind, a fragment waiting to be partnered with another and yet another to create what I call A tab lo’,” says Hansen, “I am compulsive about juxtaposing objects and images on table tops, shelves, walls and often underfoot.”
Hansen has long used her own photographs as collage material, saying, “I can somehow discover more of the magic or mystery of what I’ve photographed by juxtaposing and laying images.” She often hand-colors her black and white silver gelatin prints, uses them in combination with words (not quite poetry), combines dozens of small 4 x 4 inch color prints in grid-like patterns, and adds findings gathered from drawers, resale shops and neighborhood walks.
Her eye is unerring.
