KAREN HACKENBERG7th Anniversary Edition

Karen HacKenberg

Karen Hackenberg lives in an idyllic, coastal spot on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State — Discovery Bay, just outside Port Townsend. It’s about a 30-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle, plus another hour of driving. The ocean and the natural world surround her. Yet, even out there among the rocks, the waves, the silvery gray-green water and the wooded shoreline, man-made detritus finds its way on the shores near her home and into her paintings.

Hackenberg makes the most of discarded soda and water bottles, plastic toys, corroded paint cans, crumpled Jello containers, used tires, mismatched flip flops and empty detergent containers. She poses them along the coast, photographs the objects and paints them in all their degenerating glory. “You walk the beach and you’ll see this stuff,” said Hackenberg. “You’ll see it cluttered with the logs, wedged in between the rocks. Partly because I live in this beautiful place, and I’m lucky enough to live here, I feel an obligation to somehow bear witness to it. The insidiousness of how it’s everywhere.”

Applying gouache on paper or oil on canvas, Hackenberg utilizes a photo-realistic style, capturing all the details of that trash amid the beauty of the

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One Man’s TrasH is anOTHer Man’s Treasure

Karen HacKenberg

Arctic Thirst gouache on paper, 10.25 x 14.5in., 2011

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coast. She calls her latest series the “Watershed paintings,” and they’re featured in an exhibition through Feb. 22 at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. They’re also in a monograph published by Marquand Books. While the Watershed paintings do reflect an environmentalist sensibility and the thoughtlessness of man’s wasteful ways, Hackenberg also finds the stuff she finds on the beach enticing. “Plastics are quite seductive - they catch your eye,” she said. “I like juxtaposing the manmade shapes with the natural ones on the beach.”

In the oil on canvas Stranded Vessel (2012), a green, two-liter soda bottle balances sideways on a rock, while the setting sun glows eerily — and exquisitely — through the translucent plastic skin. In other paintings, such as Trash Dance (2013), Mighty Migration (2011) and Amphibious Landing (2012), discarded toy dinosaurs and soldiers make one last, jubilant stand on the coast against oblivion. “Most of my work has a dark underbelly, but a whimsical surface,” said Hackenberg, who got her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. “The light we have in the Northwest is really quite beautiful. The items that have been thrown away — glowed on the beach. It was stunning, with water on them in the late winter night. I’m always playing with the negative and the positive.”

After a stint as an architectural designer and model builder in San Francisco during the 1980s, Hackenberg and her husband, the artist and printer Michael Felber, relocated to Port Townsend upon

“ are quite seductive - they catch your eye,” she said. “I like juxtaposing the with the natural ones on the beach.”

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a friend’s suggestion. Hackenberg became known for her sculptures and paintings embodying environmental values and “green” sensibilities. Her work has been shown throughout the Pacific Northwest, including Fountainhead Gallery in Seattle, the Seattle Culture Center, the Port Angeles Fine Art Center, the Kirkland Art Center and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Hackenberg was included in the ocean-themed exhibition, “Beneath the Surface: Rediscovering a World Worth Conserving” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science headquarters in Washington, D.C. She’s in the permanent collections of the New York State Museum in Albany, the Bainbridge Island Museum and Washington state’s art collection.“It’s a real find to come across her work,” said Esther Luttikhuizen, a Seattle-based independent curator and former gallery owner who purchased a group of Hackenberg’s paintings for the state art collection. “The combination of the material — with gouache, the colors are so beautiful — and the setting makes it possible. The scale to me is oddly enchanting. Living up here in

the Pacific Northwest, that imagery really strikes the core.”

Besides the Watershed paintings, Hackenberg has worked on other projects. Her totem paintings depict found objects placed atop one another along the coast like Northwest American Indian totems. Her matchstick sculptures are very detailed, beehive-like creations made of burnt and unused matchsticks, along with tiny human figurines. Hackenberg creates large-scale sculptures out of recyclables, such as Water Shed, a 2010 house made of fire-salvaged aluminum, recycled copper wire, typewriter keys and hundreds of clear plastic bottles. That walk-in sculpture was installed outdoors at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center. Her Divining Line series, done in 2007 and 2008, consisted of diptych portraits capturing a person on one side and an animal on the other, usually from the wild. “She uses humor as part of her strategy,” said Gary Faigin, a Seattle-based art critic, journalist and painter. “I’m a big fan of humor in art. There’s not enough of it. Plus, the aesthetics, the formal qualities of her work are always very strong. There aren’t too many environmentally conscious

artists who have as consistent a sense of humor as she does.” Jake Seniuk, writer, photographer and former curator at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center, calls Hackenberg’s work “post-pop” and “pre-apocalyptic.” “She’s dealing with readymade images of popular mass consumer items,” Seniuk said. “When she paints, it’s a photorealist rendering. Her brushstrokes are very clean… She loves trying to find the line between nature and cultivation, or civilization.”

Hackenberg says some of her influences include Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha. Many of these artists also have combined realism and Pop art with irony, vivid color and a dark sense of humor. “I’m not active politically, but I am visually,” she said. “That’s partly why I found this magic combination in my work. I’m profoundly saddened by what goes on in the world and the losses. But at the same time, I have compassion and joy in the human spirit. It’s kind of an outgrowth of how I think and who I am. What jazzes me in life is finding those strange pivot points between the dark and the light.”

www.karenhackenberg.com

(facing page bottom) Power King II oil on canvas, 30 x 40in., 2011

(facing page top) Stranded Vessel oil on canvas, 24 x 36in., 2012

Into the Belly of the Whale gouache on paper,8 x 11in., 2012