Inside Mountain Looking Out: The dizzying art of folding representations of corners into corners.

Stevie Hanley, Mountain Base, 2010.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out [Transport], 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out, 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

Stevie Hanley, Inside Mountain Looking Out, 2011. Courtesy Dr. Ulrich Köstlin.

[Excerpt from email]

Subject: A few scrambled notes

Dear ◊◊◊◊,

The title Inside Mountain Looking Out, parallel to the artwork it represents is a slight alteration of an older form, Mountain Base, resulting in a profound new existence. The change of title furthermore denotes a change of perspective. With Mountain Base I intended to create a sort of visual pun An individual standing at the foot of an enormous mountain with a severely steep ascension gazes straight forward, not upwards toward the sky, but simply straight ahead in one’s immediate field of vision. This visual reading void of spatial-visual intelligence comprehends a wallpaper-like pattern of engulfing earth, trees staggered vertically upwards, and animals looking almost as if they are floating above or around trees rather than comprehending that instead of a bear floating in a brown nebulous plane above a tree, that actually the bear is standing further up the mountain. When perspective zooms in so close it is unable to comprehend the whole. This naïve visual flight of fancy is something akin to the act of image making itself.

(Example: This Line Is Part Of A Very Large Circle, Yoko Ono, 1966.)

A simple split down the center and Mountain Base became Inside Mountain Looking Out. Of course there was a lot more work to be done after the initial and decisive cut, however they were simply formalities added onto a major architectural transformation. I should also state this cut did not spontaneously come out of nowhere; it was long in the making. In fact, the night before I installed the work at the Center for Endless Progress I came close to cutting the piece but restrained myself judging it to be too big a risk to take the night before installing my solo-exhibition. It was however the first thing I did when I took the piece off the wall, on the very floor of the gallery itself. Moreover, on closer inspection one may see that the original base structure of the drawing was in fact a flat representation of a corner:

The dizzying art of folding representations of corners into corners.

Something that failed to come to words in my conversation with you was the works relationship to shame, perhaps due to a sense of embarrassment itself or a fear that it would be too heavy for comfort. This relationship to shame is in fact the main reason for being drawn into the corner.

I have been interested in shame, in particular shame in relationship to the construction of a homosexual identity. Didier Eribon wrote a book entitled Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. I found this book to be an endless source of inspiration and enlightenment. My senior thesis at the University of California Berkeley for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, my second major after Practice of Art, was entitled Participation of Shame and the "Feminine Stigmata" in Gender Surveillance of the "Male Invert." It was a deeply personal and cathartic text that I believe is still playing out in my work today.

The physical act of shoving ones nose into the corner connotes punishment and it puts the actor into a severely vulnerably state where one's sense of sight is rendered useless to void off what may be coming from behind to breathe down your neck: one is “cornered”. I use to have this fear that the devil was constantly behind me breathing down my neck, and when I would turn he would turn in sequence with me, always right behind me almost kissing the back of my ear.

Horse Blinders

Whereas Mountain Base was about repudiating or severely limiting vision by means of zooming in so close that vital periphery information is denied, a sort of "blinder" vision, Inside Mountain Looking Out antithetically imbues the viewer with a supernatural vision. If one is to take the title for its word: Inside Mountain Looking Out, then the viewer finds themselves in the inside of a mountain looking out through stone and dirt. This is really what the work is all about, a sort of naive child's triumphant over being forced to stick their nose into the corner,

and having the walls simply evaporate to reveal the world outside both thrilling and blissful, and where there should be an absence of sight one finds deep perspective, in which one must squint to make out the birds far in the distance.