Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces

Artist, Maren Hassinger: My name is Maren Hassinger.

I primarily do sculpture. But movement and dance were a big part of my development. At some point, I discovered, in a junkyard, wire rope. And I could weld it and heat it and make it bend and do all those kinds of things to it. To make these, I would ask the factory to cut them into 16 inch lengths. Then I would pry open one end with a screwdriver, and unwrap around until I got it down to where I wanted it.

And I always thought of them as palmettos or tropical vegetation. And in putting these palmettos together, facing one up, one down, they also danced, I thought. They danced in space. They became very humanoid in that way.

I met Linda Goode Bryant sometime in the early eighties. When JAM moved into its headquarters in Tribeca, I remember one of the things about that space was it was fairly cavernous and there was the opportunity to really start experimenting boldly with performances. It was a very, very lively, very artistic group of folks who inhabited the neighborhood and I felt really part of something.