01/19/2016

Hypnic Jerk

Featured participant: Kara Hansen

Opening reception: 19:30 Friday December 11, 2015

Exhibition date: December 12 to January 16th 2016

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Kara Hansen is artist and writer living in Vancouver BC. Through improvisation, costume, makeup, scripts, and movement scores, her work engages collaboration to build absurd narratives around the body. Recent exhibitions include Live Biennale (2015) at Vivo Media Arts and No Monologue (2015) at 221A, Vancouver. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University.

 

SPARE ROOM presents Hypnic Jerk, a solo exhibition by Kara Hansen.

A hypnic jerk or sleep twitch is an involuntary movement that occurs at the moment an individual enters sleep. This sensation is comparable to the feeling of falling and causes an individual to suddenly wake.

Taking this in-between state as its title, the exhibition Hypnic Jerk merges dreaming, therapeutic practice, and grooming, to allude to day-to-day transformations.

Through mixed media works, video installation and sculpture, this exhibition plots the personal habits of a lone glove. On an ordinary day the glove wakes up to a mirror, to shave and style what’s left of its hair, maybe later it will dance alone to eventually lounge and fall back asleep. Posing the glove as a stand-in for herself, Hansen experiments with herbal psychotropics, large scale paintings and spatial illusions.