contact
Questions? Comments? Inquiries? Send me a note below or call 970.274.6222
xhsiig@gmail.com
I also love the USPS. Send mail to:
244 N. 7th St. Carbondale, CO 81623 U.S.A.
about
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Chris Hassig (1987-) is an artist and community leader in Carbondale, Colorado.
Growing up with a pencil in hand, a fascination with maps, and an unbridled imagination, at thirteen Chris began inventing and mapping a fictional country he called Saiopor. The project continued in a secret sketchbook throughout his high school and college years, as the pages became ever more detailed, sophisticated, and palimpsestic. The ambition to fit entire cities within a 9 x 12 page incidentally honed a fine drafting technique, which he occasionally turned toward nature during backpacking trips into the Colorado and Wyoming Rockies.
With a sketch of a patch of grass outside the Johnson art building at Middlebury College, Chris delved into the complexity and detail of nature by closely examining and drawing, blade by blade, a ubiquitous and seemingly banal American subject: a grass lawn. As the ink grass drawings later became an easter-egg laden studio project and grew in scale, Chris pushed them towards pattern and abstraction rather than botanical illustration. The composition of the drawings evolved from simple horizons into geometric forms intended to revolutionize the aesthetic impact of the work from a distance. This achieved a simultaneous feat of calm minimalism and evolving complexity, depending on how close one came to the drawing.
A printmaking apprenticeship at Mixit Print Studio in Somerville, MA in 2012, 2013 and 2014 finally cracked open the sketchbook and let its subject matter out into a more public format. One culmination of the apprenticeship was an ambitious 4’ x 6’ map of Ralesis, the capital city of Saiopor, composed of eight etched copper plates. During a 2016 printmaking residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO, Chris expanded the map to 12 panels (4’ x 9’) and began developing a project to describe and illustrate the neighborhoods of Ralesis in an increasingly novelistic way. In 2019, Ralesis was further expanded to 24 panels (8’ x 10.5’).
Side projects with cyanotypes, painting, and collage during the Mixit apprenticeship allowed Chris to explore looser, more wabi-sabi processes that would find their way into both the drawings and printmaking techniques used on the maps. Chris also began using sewn elements in some of his printing projects as a way to reintroduce the direct hand into the work.
The latent abstraction in the grass drawings became more overt as Chris pushed beyond grass into a more evocative realm, using both diverse and repetitive mark making and mixed media to create abstract drawings that simultaneously suggest geology, landscape, and atmosphere. Chris continues to learn from nature to explore this progression — mixing new media, embracing mistakes, exploring incomplete erasures, and looking to the source as much as possible.
Encompassing his art practice, Chris is an elected member of the Board of Trustees for the Town of Carbondale, a DJ at KDNK Community Radio, a member of the Carbondale Creative District planning group, an avid telemark skier, backpacker, packrafter, occasional gardener, boombiker with the Carbondale Full-Moon Cruise, and noisemaker/singer with the Rhizomatic All-Stars.
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Art is everywhere — grown from a seed in the earth, drawn in hairline script, swept just so in an ephemeral pattern, awakened to in a wild landscape, or forged in community. Art’s enemies are greed, waste, and carelessness. Nature creates the original and greatest art. At best I hope to learn from, love, and honor it. Authenticity, patience, iteration, finesse, accretion, erosion, disruption, cooperation, imperfection, and resurrection. Those are some of nature’s tools that inform my craft.
I like the humility of drawings. They’re cheaper to make than, say, bronze or neon, which lets you iterate and learn more while taking less from nature to do it. At the same time, I like the audacity of drawing — I was raised by architects and learned the power of a drawing. It can perplex, persuade, ignite a leap of imagination, or become the seed to monumental change.
If art is everywhere, I try to tap into it in all of my pursuits. Whether putting brush to paper, dancing and drawing on skis, or working to protect my community and its water and people, I see it all as one commitment to try to live an open, meaningful, moral life worthy of my immeasurable blessings.
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This site is an informal gallery of selected work. Much of it is for sale--please contact me if any particular piece interests you.
All images are copyright Chris Hassig and may be used with permission.
Thanks.