The Harris Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Hacer.
With a skillful balance of formal design and personal showmanship, Hacer creates precise, large-scale sculptures rooted in narratives of childhood play. As a youth, Hacer entertained friends with his ability to create origami animal forms. Like an improvisational performer or slight of hand magician, his techniques and quick reflexes allowed him to alter a flat sheet of paper into an animal with distinct features, and then, with his audience captivated, a pinch, a fold and a flip changed that first creature into an entirely new character.
The concept of child’s play as invention and innovation is an integral element of Alexander Calder’s miniature circus wire sculptures as well as Frank Ghery’s crumpled paper forms, which serve as the basis for his impressive buildings. In their grand scale, Hacer’s rigorous metal works simultaneously embody the joy of his early three-dimensional discoveries and the sophistication of his present, highly engineered practice.
The physical dynamics of disorientating scale shifts and unexpected perspectives can be a powerful narrative device, setting the stage for a fantastic experience — ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift and ‘Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There’ by Lewis Carroll are perfect examples. With altered actual sizes and recalibrated relative scales, Hacer’s sculptural works introduce a lively interplay to our spatial perception, and our environment becomes oddly unfamiliar and dreamlike. Much like in childhood, his imagery is humbly born from sheets of paper. Creasing and folding transforms two-dimensional paper planes into structural animal forms. These geometric handheld representations of dogs, bear cubs and rabbits are playful and delicate. The small paper animals can be easily crushed in the palm of a hand, like a severe punishment from an angry beanstalk giant.
After carefully working through a character design, Hacer selects a finalized paper animal to serve as a proportionally accurate model for a massive metal sculpture. With careful attention to detail, the paper animal’s playful personality is translated from paper into steel. The final full-size sculpture stands before us appearing as though the toy-like character has magically grown or we have mysteriously shrunk.
Hacer was born in 1976 in Ventura, California. He studied structural welding and motorcycle mechanics at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. Hacer has worked co-fabricating and finishing sculptural works by Jeff Koons, Ellsworth Kelly and John McCracken. In the Los Angeles area, his permanent public sculptures can be viewed at the Autry National Center of the American West and at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, and he was recently shortlisted by the Los Angeles County Civic Art Program. Hacer has exhibited extensively throughout the United States at galleries, art centers and museums with solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dallas and San Antonio. His work has been featured in numerous publications including Artillery Magazine, Public Art Review Magazine, Riviera Magazine and Bunkerhill Magazine.
