Hanson and Sonnenberg
21 Sep — 29 Oct 2005

Hanson & Sonnenberg
Something bad has happened. A sports scoreboard lies mangled on the floor. An old Hotpoint stove stands looking forlorn and bereft of its kitchen surroundings. A tethered bicycle has been abandoned. Other objects attest to human social presence. A chaotic bundle of microphone wires trails into a messy sprawl – its title, ‘Soapbox' suggests that at some point, someone had something to say. A group of speakers entitled ‘Third Party' suggests the aftermath of the exposition of a big idea. All these objects are works by Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, a Canadian-born, New York based duo who produce work collaboratively. Hanson and Sonnenberg's sculptures look like they have been evacuated from their use value, dropping out of whatever social system they were once part of - the Generation X of objecthood if you like. The modernist dictum of form following function has been replaced - not by kooky postmodernist form masking or playing with function, but rather by dropping the idea of function all together. Once function has gone, then so has the agreed use value of any object and once agreement has gone, then what is left as a basis for useful social interaction?

Hanson and Sonnenberg's work can be understood as commenting on such inherent failures within human communication. In their work collaborative practice is not a perfect synthesis of two voices but rather an imperfect set of negotiations where the final result might be several steps away from each starting point. One could argue that the eruption of conflict from the breakdown of social agreement is at the heart of their work; as meaning breaks down fists take over, as seen in their revisiting of ice hockey fights in a number of works. There is little point looking to the two-dimensional work to explain the sculptural objects. They are not explanatory drawings but instead seem to riff on the same problems of being an object in the world freed from its original functions. How then to agree what these things ought to be when they don't want to follow what they were supposed to do? How then to agree on anything indeed when all the big Enlightenment rule-books have been invalidated? As a way of beginning to answer this question Hanson and Sonnenberg offer the following suggestions: mediate on differences, chuck rules out the window, drop sticks and punch each other, hard.

Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg live and work in Brooklyn, New York. They met at university in Chicago and have been working together ever since. They have had solo exhibitions at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA, Cohan and Leslie, NY, and White Columns, NY and have participated in many international shows including ‘Withdrawl’ at NYEHAUS, NY (with John Bock and Rikrit Tiravanija), Galerie Chez Valetin, Paris, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NY and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. For further information please contact Louise Hayward or Niru Ratnam at STORE.