Karl Haendel: Billboard outside Pèrez Art Museum
I-395, Pèrez Art Museum, Miami
For the series Double Dominant, Karl Haendel visited artists, typically in their home or studio, to photograph their dominant hand. Following these brief photography sessions, Haendel painstakingly crafted digital images incorporating two iterations of the dominant hand into a carefully choreographed double portrait, drawing the new unnatural pairs at a colossal, almost architectural scale.
What at first glance appear to be regular, symmetrical pairs of right and left hands soon reveal themselves to be fascinatingly bizarre, even uncanny. The Goliath hands are freakish in size, grotesque and humorously awkward at times, but also in turns exquisitely beautiful and awe-inspiring. One gets lost in the hands’ creases, their pores, their hairs and freckles; their arching digits, tendons, and doughy finger pads. Each finger seems an individual being.
The Double Dominants stand among the most overtly personal works in Haendel’s oeuvre, as the drawings are attached to specific names. The titles belong to the artist’s in-person network, including close friends and others he identifies as elective affinities. The project was deployed as a reason to reach out to fellow artists whose work and ambitious vision he admires. In this, the many symbolic handshakes that the project represents form a virtual intentional community.
In a different sense, one might perceive this list of names as an idiosyncratic, artist-driven version of LA’s contemporary art history in the first two decades of the 21st century, beginning with the moment when Haendel first arrived in LA to attend grad school at UCLA and was introduced to the large, interconnected artists’ network across the city.
A selection of Karl Haendel's Double Dominant drawings is on view on a monumental scale via a digital billboard along the 395 in Miami, next to the Perez Art Museum, featuring artists in the permanent collection of PAMM; Tala Madani, Walead Beshty, rafa esparza and Kathryn Andrews. The public art project is organized by curator Diana Nawi.
