Shannon Landis Hansen

Shannon Landis Hansen

A visit to Shannon Landis Hansen’s studio, a block from Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville, is a journey through an artist’s imagination, an imagination driven by the lives of inanimate objects as they pass from hand to hand through time. Shelves along the walls contain thousands of tiny figurines and objects from the past. Little porcelain dolls stare out into the room like actors just off stage, waiting for their turn to perform. To Hansen, each is a silent memory that has a part to play, a story to tell.

Objects are given new life and meaning as she builds three-dimensional, layered assemblages with glue, mastic, and wood. The process begins by smashing the little porcelain figures with a hammer and then placing the parts in the composition, juxtaposing fragments side by side with other broken bits. The idea is that the original object takes on a new context and connections as it passes through time. She starts with an idea and then it changes, evolves, grows, and makes one see the object in a different way.

“Everything is transitory. Yet, here they are,” she says, as her hand sweeps across the crowded walls of her studio. “They have survived people. They go in and out of fashion, get lost, get broken, thrown away. Yet, they go on in one form or another. And I honor them for that and all the people that had them.”

Hansen says she has always been drawn to objects because they are precious and delicate, and yet they survive the people who owned them. Eventually, they are relegated to a box of junk. Values change. Again, her assemblages are about time and, fittingly, often contain parts from old clocks. For as she says, “I am interested in the way we pass through time.”

Biennale lamp

According to Hansen, viewers often don’t understand the stories she is telling in her work. Instead, they ask where she finds the “stuff.” She urges them to look beyond individual pieces.

“They don’t understand the relationships,” she says, glancing around her studio. “Maybe that’s my fault. They tell stories. I feel these objects dictate that I get out of the way, and I like that. People have to engage in my work. Often times I feel that I fail to communicate as much as I want to, but I just have to let that go.”

To an observer, her focus on transitory time seems autobiographical. Born in Seattle in 1947, Shannon spent her early years with her mother, moving from place to place, settling for a while in rough fishing villages and construction camps in the Pacific Northwest, later in Memphis and then Arizona, eventually landing in Los Angeles where she spent most of her life. And like the little figurines in her studio that are passing through time, here she is telling her stories of transition.

In 2004, Hansen and husband Erik moved from Los Angeles to a 19th-century cottage in the Faubourg Marigny section of New Orleans, just below the French Quarter.  There, she was fascinated by the aging neighborhood, the decay and the striking visuals at the turn of every corner. Two years after arriving in the city, Erik landed a job teaching theater at the University of New Orleans. After ten years, the couple moved to Mandeville where they purchased a late 19th century house with an attached apartment for her studio.

Those years in Faubourg Marigny inspired a dramatic assemblage titled “Digging on Mount New Orleans.” In the descending depths of the totem-like, 5 1/2-foot mound are layers of broken objects and figurines that represent the history and transition of life in New Orleans. Some objects came from an old privy that she found in her garden in the Marigny. Others were given to her by neighbors. In a way, “Mount New Orleans” is reminiscent of that 100-foot-high mountain of debris that once stood along Pontchartrain Expressway in the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina struck the city in 2005. Again, layers of history.

Digging on Mount “New Orleans”

Hansen’s layered career has brought her national recognition. She began as a painter with awards and shows at, among others, the National Academy of Design in New York. In the 1980s, she turned to creating assemblages. That, too, brought success with shows at galleries in Los Angeles, UCLA, and at other prestigious venues. In 2008 the Arts Council of New Orleans and the Joan Mitchell Foundation commissioned her to construct a monumental-sized post Katrina mosaic sculpture in City Park titled “Still Standing.” In 1910 the foundation moved the piece to its property on Bayou Road in New Orleans. Hansen’s work also appeared in New Orleans Art for Art’s Sake in 2020 and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s show, “Louisiana Contemporary 2022.”

Recognition is important to artists, but it is self-expression that drives them. Hansen says her work may look chaotic, but it helps her make order in a chaotic world.

“It’s important to me to connect to what’s going on around me,” she says. “It’s a big world and very complex, and you don’t want it explained to you, you want to experience it.”

As Hansen says, “Everything has possibilities. Everything changes.”

Hansen is represented by LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans.

Visit shannonlandishansen.com.