EMILY HASS | Corners + Circles | MELANIE’S OFFICE
June 2 - July 26, 2024
Using the language of architecture, my work traces shifts and disruptions of place. From 2006 to 2016, my artwork was based on archival architectural records of the Berlin homes and workplaces of Jews and persecuted artists and intellectuals in the 1930s, beginning with my father's childhood home, where he had lived until 1938.
In 2016, having spent a decade making work about forced migration from Berlin, I suddenly found my project linked to a present-day crisis: I couldn’t continue to consider Berlin’s relationship to the experience of exile and place, identity and culture, without thinking about Syria. I began traveling regularly to Berlin to meet with displaced people and traveled to Athens to attempt to understand that part of the journey: the arduous water crossings, the inability to travel freely, and the excruciating tedium and powerlessness of waiting. Drawing on my conversations with displaced people, I embarked on a new body of work with the aim of representing statelessness visually, conveying both displacement, fragmentation, and strength.
Reflecting on the ways people adapt and invent in times of crisis, and the dignity even the most minimal and insufficient shelter provides, I began a series called Corners, burlap works depicting the corners of the tarps that serve as the roofs and walls of makeshift DIY shelters on Samos. I also began to use canvas as sculpture, rather than a substrate for painting: cutting swaths into strips, fracturing and dividing the work.
When Covid-19 emerged, I left New York to be with my father who was in his late eighties and living alone on Martha’s Vineyard. Thinking of the ways a person’s identity can feel divided when they are forced to relocate, I cut twelve-inch plywood squares into geometric forms: Water Shapes. When placed at the water’s edge or on its surface, Water Shapes drift apart and come back together into their original form, or reconfigure, creating entirely new compositions that I can neither direct nor control. Initially, I had in mind the small boats that make dangerous crossings, the extreme vulnerability of the passengers far from home, and the forced reconfigurations of their lives.
And as the pandemic altered all our lives, I began reflecting on dislocation more broadly. The geometric shapes began to embody the external and internal building blocks of identity, constantly deconstructed and reconstructed, yet somehow forming a whole.
Emily Hass was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lives and works in New York City. Hass holds graduate degrees in psychology and design from Harvard University and has received residencies at MacDowell, La Maison Dora Maar, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. She was a 2019 Howard Foundation Fellow and has been awarded the McCloy Fellowship in Art and grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. A monograph of Hass’ Exiles series was published in 2021.