Works by artist Jason Hackenwerth debut at Creative Pinellas

Darkmatter, an exhibition of work by Creative Pinellas Professional Artist grantee Jason Hackenwerth, opens Friday at the organization’s Walsingham Road Gallery. The artist, who moved to St. Pete with his wife in 2017, is fine-tuning the exhibit night and day.

“I’m making two enormous sculptures that will take up almost the entirety of the Great Room at Creative Pinellas,” an excited Hackworth explains. “I’m filling it from ceiling to floor and wall to wall. It’s going to be very full and extremely dynamic with sculpture.”

Temporary permanence: “Aviary” hung for one night at the Guggenheim Museum in New York – for the Works & Process Gala event in April 2014.

As a sculptor, Hackenworth’s chosen medium is the latex balloon – relax, eco-warriors, they’re biodegradable – and he creates unique sculptures by lacing thousands of them together, in different sizes, shapes and colors in vaguely crustacean-shaped forms.

(One of his pieces hung in the rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2014.)

As for Darkmatter, the artist declares, the other galleries will be full of paintings, some enormous, some not so, and there’ll be one room devoted to his process drawings  – early road maps showing where the sculpture might be heading.

“I’ve been making those drawings now for 20 years, and have never shown them,” Hackenwerth says. “But they’re lovely drawings. I think they’re very revealing to the process, to see them in between the sculptures and the paintings, is very exciting for me.

“I’ve lived with these things for years, but to see them up feels very, very special. It’s such an honor.”

Hackenwerth’s process, for sculpture, begins with a mediation-based “imagination session.”

“In that state, I feel as if I invite the form,” he says. “I create an open space, and then the form seems to emerge from the ether. When that happens, I quickly get to drawing and I try to capture it while it’s fresh.

“Then that drawing starts to inform what the piece is about. Then I can start to plug in colors and things. But oftentimes I need multiple sessions of meditation – once I’ve got the form in mind, then it takes a while to develop some language about the form, and what that means. There’s always some meaning behind the work.”

From Jason Hackenwerth’s Artist Statement:

As an artist, I see my function as similar to a hiker on a remote trail who piles stones along the way to help others remain on the path. And as such, when I encounter dazzling works by other artists I feel a connectedness to the experience. A feeling of affirmation that others have taken this path and that it is a worth-while endeavor. When the rocks are piled so carefully and so skillfully that they seem to defy gravity, it is a reminder to let go of the need to reach the destination and rather, to recognize that what is most sacred are the examples we leave for others along the journey.

“Hellfire for Breakfast.”

Hackenworth got an MFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2003, and subsequently moved to New York City. He began creating balloon installations in public places – “I just needed to share something joyful” – and as his notoriety grew, his talent blossomed and he became internationally famous for the sheer creativity, and yes, the audacity, of his abstract constructs.

“I always said that the process of making those sculptures would eventually make me a better painter,” he explains, “and I said that when I returned to painting I’ll use what they taught me. The biggest part of that is knowing that the process is the portal, and not to worry as much about what we’re making but more about how we’re making it, and enjoying that process. And the same is true for those paintings.”

“After the Holiday.”

Careful observers will notice that there’s almost always an image of a vessel, or a “portal,” in Hackenwerth’s boldly-colored paintings, amidst the English-language words and other symbols and directives.

“In the same sense, making those paintings, for me, is my portal to that unconscious realm. And so are the sculptures.”

Hackenwerth’s metaphysical belief system carries over to the very end of the process for his sculptures: The notion of impermanence.

Much like the Tibetan monks who create elaborate sand mandalas in real time, only to destroy them, Hackenwerth does not let his latex sculptures linger in time or space. At the conclusion of Darkmatter, in mid-October, he will literally burst every balloon.

This, too, is an important concept for Jason Hackenwerth. “Since they’re bio-degradable, not plastic, they just go back to dirt,” he explains. “Like an oak leaf.

“I’m using what nature gives us to make something beautiful that inspires people.”

Darkmatter opens with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday (July 22). Creative Pinellas website.