The Portraits, 2006, [All American]
The continuing series of Happiness paintings is rooted in highly publicized media images, subjected to a process of "further manipulation." I select only those manipulations which exude confidence, coherence, and strength. These paintings live within in a continuing series of mediations on American propaganda, and in particular the promise of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
A moving portrait, a continuation in a series of works about the great American documents.
Hesse uses classic postmodern strategies - parody, amplification, deconstruction, and indexicality - to examine the role of art and image in nation building and formation of cultural identity. Throughout Exporting Liberty we are continually dazzled by formal beauty and seduced by spectacle. This experience makes us aware of these same machinations in the global arena...Perhaps the real question posed by Hesse's work in Exporting Liberty is this: What price, freedom? Anne-Marie Russell, What Price Freedom, Exporting Liberty Catalog essay, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson.
This life-sized gum-ball covered HumVee comments on pop culture and reminds us of soldiers handing candy to children in far-flung countries at war with us. The palette of the gum balls reappears in The Candychromes.
In this metaphoric threshold and journey across the ocean, the videos are made to look like history paintings. The image to the east is slowed down to an almost imperceptible movement in this seascape with a ship ever so slowly leaving the Old World. In the video to the west, waves crash and crash onto the shore in rapid succession, not unlike new citizens arriving at the shores of my chosen home.
American Dream offers an alternate route to the rhetoric of hard work by providing a shortcut to success to one lucky person who will draw the "You're the lucky winner" ticket. The winnable item here: a panel of gumballs, a small slice of SugarCoated
A White House wedding cake, surrounded by pillars as in the entrance house of the wedding cake. This cake is a comment on the idea of the world having to get married to the U.S. to continue having relevance.
A series of monochromatic paintings in the scheme of Tom Ridge's Homeland Security Warning System. Fear, color coded. The same palette appears in Sugar Coated above.
A propagandistic painting of our cult figure and most dominant export, liberty, taken to the heights of a “new world religion.”
A contemplation on committing oneself to a new country, its civic education and duties, which many Americans many take for granted. The verbs are removed, and reconstituted as object on the wall, a process taken up to engage more fully with the beauty and meaning of the language.
The smoke-filled backroom where deals are made by gray-suited men (and one woman in a red suit). Made to look like it is there to be participated in, the viewer finds herself standing on the outside of the game.
In this iteration of American Dream, an original drawing was the winnable item.
Slogans taken from The Great American Handbook are incised into highly finished gessoed surfaces. The texts are interspersed with painted and drawn images of the Statue of Liberty.
Coming to America often involves crossing vast bodies of water. These same bodies of water then lie between the immigrant and her country of origin, continually lapping against each shore. In this installation, light reflections play on the surface of the structure. The waves are made in intervals by timed wave makers. The installation alters one’s path through the space.
Upon entering, visitors pick up an instruction card. Each card gives a different instruction, asking the participant to use either an eraser or a piece of chalk, and to participate in the making/ unmaking of the connect-the-dot drawing on the wall. Their particular participation may be to connect a certain set of dots, or to erase what the last person did, or to comment in their own way on the continually evolving connect-the-dot drawing of the Statue of Liberty.
Fifty pins are arranged on the wall in the shape of Liberty’s head. Participants are handed a ball of yarn and are asked to connect the dots in any way they wish.
The outline of Lady Liberty's head is pin-pricked into the highly finished surface. Four different routes are mapped along the outline of Liberty, steps numbered in ink waiting to be connected; four different maps of negotiating coming to America, present and past. There are four works total, two shown here with detail. The individual drawings are entitled The closer I Get to Her, the Further I Get From You, Drawn to the Flame, Re/Learning Language, and A Certain History.