If you have yet to check out Cannupa Hanska's colorful and wonderfully eccentric mixed-media sculptures in I Love You to Death, Friday night offers the optimum time to stop by Eggman & Walrus Art Emporium.
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Hanska, a Santa Fe resident and a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), will demonstrate his creation techniques and field queries in a Q-and-A session from 6 to 7:30 pm. Then, from 8 to 9 pm, Glad as Knives, a band featuring Hanska and Ginger Dunnill, will perform its "avant guard [sic] electronica neo soul inspired music," which apparently serves as a major source of inspiration for Hanska's strange figures.
In a press release about the event distributed last week, Eggman head honcho Evan Glassman described the show and performance as "groundbreaking." Seeing as that word is one of the more dramatic adjectives one could invoke, we decided to press him about it a bit. This subsequently yielded the words "revolutionary," "atypical," "innovative" and "non-traditional" to describe Hanska's work (which is made up of metal, clay and other materials), which didn't do much to explain the "groundbreaking" thing. "I've never seen anything quite like [his work]," Glassman says. "It's sort of an alchemy experimenting with these forms and materials, [and] it seems to be working."
Although Hanska is a contemporary Native American artist, Glassman emphasizes that what makes him special is that his work isn't simply contemporary Native American art. Another pertinent detail is that Hanska produced the work for I Love You to Death in only five weeks. In case you miss tonight's events, the exhibition, which opened on August 5, will be on display through September. (The original closing date of 9/10 has since been extended.)
One last thing: in case you've been sitting there wondering how you'd say the artist's name out loud, the correct pronounciation is "Chuh-new-puh Hanz-kuh."
