"EcoArt"
EcoArt, a solo exhibition of paintings by Karen Hackenberg 78 PT, will be on view at the PUB Gallery of Art from Wednesday, January 18 – Thursday, March 16, 2023.
The PUB Gallery of Art is located at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington. Hackenberg will also be the featured speaker at the college's Studium Generale presentation on Thursday, March 2.
The tenuous boundary between living nature and human encroachment is the primary unifying theme in Hackenberg’s artwork.
In her Divining Line series of large-scale diptych portraits she pairs people with animals and provides a side-by-side visual comparison of non-human and human animals.
“Placing creatures of differing sizes together in the landscape as if they are the same physical size challenges historical western methods of three-dimensional perspective, as well as condescending western attitudes about animals,” Hackenberg said. “The resulting paintings are ambiguous while subtly nudging assumptions about hierarchy and power in our relationships with nature.”
Her beach plastic paintings take a light-hearted yet subversive approach to the serious subject of ocean degradation and present a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of imaginary post-consumer sea creatures. Working traditionally with oil, gouache, and pencil, she meticulously crafts images of beach trash, aiming to create a provocative collision of form and idea. This work is influenced by Pop Art of the 1960s - Claes Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects, as well as Ed Ruscha’s paintings combining marketing graphics with images of nature.
