Please Play

Skye Gallery Aspen is delighted to present Please Play, new work by Spencer Hansen. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Please Play is the culmination of a lifetime of artistic explorations featuring new one-of-a-kind pieces of interactive handmade sculpture and masks. Simultaneously familiar and foreign, they have the power to elicit nostalgia and a sense of belonging, with an undeniable essence of something still unknown. Articulating limbs and a heavy focus on patinas exalts each piece a depth of life and invites the viewer to engage. Hansen’s masks explore the process of transformation. By wearing a mask, we are not hiding behind, but emerging from, an act of becoming, allowing a new and uninhibited relationship to self and surroundings. This invitation blurs the line of the traditional separation of art and the viewer to replace “please do not touch” with, Please Play. Kind, curious, introspective and fun his creatures imprint hearts and minds.

Working with a palette of natural materials of wood, leather, metal, ceramic and bone, each piece dances with the relationship between light and dark, texture, weight, time and form. The show speaks to Spencer’s lifestyle and the way he chooses to create, inseparable concepts, continually creating as a vital life process of self - expression. The resulting narrative is an exhibition of intelligent and thoughtful designs translated into a world that invites one to engage in curiosity, interact, emerge and play.