I'm an artist making systems and objects for play, performance, sculpture, interactive installation, animation, and video. I make tools, toys, puppets, costumes, movies, bricks, and invent stories, sporting events, and camera rigs.
I combine soft and hard materials, digital fabrication processes, interactive and real time media, and techniques from online DIY culture to blur consumer-producer boundaries and challenge the way in which industrial forms of production displace visible forms of human labor. The absurd systems and narratives I'm making are my way to explore and interpret cultures surrounding personal technologies, play, work, labor, children’s media, fantasy, and the relationship between bodies and technological progress.
I mostly live and work in Pittsburgh PA, where I teach sculpture at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University; am currently an artist in residence at the Mattress Factory Museum; and am engaged in a research project called the Play Object Project through the Center for the Arts in Society, which has allowed me to pilot an artist in residence program at the Children's School, a lab preschool housed on campus. I love creating art making workshops for kids ages 3 through 103!
I also serve as Co-director of Programming for The Folly Tree Arboretum, a non-profit organization based in Springs, NY founded over 10 years ago by my partner and collaborator, Tucker Marder. The Arboretum is a cultural archive of trees dedicated to environmental storytelling, and also produces projects that address human’s relationship to the natural world and supports the work of others who are developing new and creative methods of environmental storytelling. The Arboretum hosts an artist-in-residence program, puppet shows, a blossoming children's camp directed by yours truly, and also gives out awards, throws parties, invents sports, hangs out with animals, and produces a bunch of other art stuff.
I have also previously worked as an Assistant Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts and at The Ohio State University in the Department of Art and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. My solo and collaborative installations, systems, and performances have been exhibited at the Akron Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Industry City Gallery, the Parrish Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Miller Gallery, the Lightwell Gallery at University of Oklahoma, the Anderson Gallery at VCU, The Moss Art Center at Virginia Tech, The Odyssey Theater, Guild Hall Center for Visual and Performing Arts, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to have been a Rauschenberg Foundation Artist in Residence and the recipient of the Daedalus Foundation fellowship, as well as the American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize, Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grants from the Studio for Creative Inquiry, and a Fund for Research and Creativity Grant from the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. I received my MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and my BA from Columbia University. If you want to see my whole CV just ask!
isla.hansen@gmail.com