Dans la Lune
If Marie Antoinette went in for paper party decorations, they probably would have looked like “Dans la Lune,” Kirsten Hassenfeld’s fall installation at Rice Gallery.
Hassenfeld’s frothy, swirling and ornate concoctions painstakingly crafted almost exclusively from translucent white paper filled the gallery. Chains of honeycombed tissue-paper spheres created strands of “beads” that swagged across the gallery ceiling, while glowing, chandelier-like shapes dangled throughout the gallery.
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The pieces in the installation took thousands of hours to create. After conceiving each object, Hassenfeld slowly built it up by folding, cutting, gluing and rolling a variety of papers to create the desired form.
“Dans la Lune” literally translates as “on the moon,” but Hassenfeld explained that it also is a French expression that means, “He’s got his head in the clouds,” or “He’s on another planet.” The installation certainly produced a fantastic, ethereal environment, and Hassenfeld said she tried “to create an imaginary place that relates to our longings for a better, grander existence.”
The Rice Gallery installation commission gave Hassenfeld the opportunity and means to execute her delicate work on an extremely large scale. The lavishly adorned white-foam-board shapes of the hanging chandelier sculptures ranged from four to eight feet in diameter. Faceted “jewels” and “crystals,” exactingly constructed from frameworks of straws and pipe cleaners covered with paper, dripped from one chandelier, and the profile of a woman, crafted from fanned tissue paper, glowed in the center of another. At the center of yet another chandelier, a doll-like figure with a massive circular skirt looked like it could be Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess. Elsewhere, an oval paper medallion was embossed with an image of Bacchus holding a goblet of wine, and intricate lacy designs executed in vellum were sprinkled throughout the installation.