Aileen Bassis

Reader’s Art 12 : Longing for Home  Aileen Bassis:

“In 2006 I discovered that my mother was developing dementia.  It was a devastating and overwhelming shock.  The person that I knew my entire life was dissolving before me.  As an artist, I make work about subjects that disturb and concern me and so I made art about mom and indirectly, me.  All of the texts are from my conversations with her.  Since I made this work, my father has passed away, and mom is now in assisted living.  I visit often and listen to her rambling words and mourn the loss of the person she used to be.  I no longer make art about her. ”

Reader’s Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16-April 26, 2012
opening reception, Friday, March 16, 7-10pm

Textile Art by Susan Hensel

Discover the transformation of textile art by Susan Hensel. Susan Hensel is a multidisciplinary artist, with a 50+ year career. She combines a mixed media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. She also makes sculptures and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery. These artworks are designed in the computer and stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine. The goal is to create an experience for the viewer that overwhelms with color and transcends the quotidian, encouraging one, for even a few seconds. To step outside the narrative of the ego into a place of pure sensation.

Hensel’s artwork is known and collected nationwide. It is represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute. There are major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, University of Washington, Baylor University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artist’s books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. Hensel’s curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery. Hensel has curated over seventy exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.