Twin
Wendy Hanson
Bellevue Art Museum
510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, 425-519-0770
Through Oct 14.

In response to the oft-repeated charge that art is too personal and that artists are self-centered, I offer as contradiction (and, in an unexpected way, confirmation) Wendy Hanson's Twin at the Bellevue Art Museum.

The title is singular but the subject is plural: the twins Annette Cohn and Florine Falk. I first encountered these sisters at an art opening about a year ago. There in the hot, crowded gallery I spotted a pair of older ladies with matching stiff platinum bouffant hairdos and pantsuits both loud and elegant, stuck in among the nonchalant hipsters like bright flowers in a lawn filled with crabgrass. Their throaty laughs carried over the din of art world chitchat; they floated through the crowd on clouds of perfume. Through thirdhand gossip I found out that someone was making a documentary about them, and other than that I knew nothing. They were like Las Vegas in Dubuque.

The documentary turns out to be a set of eight installations by Hanson, using Annette and Florine as a starting point to investigate ideas about identity and history and what makes us us, as opposed to someone else. If one were a cold-hearted theorist inclined to structuralism, one could call the sisters identical texts with differing contents--certainly a challenge for a visual artist, how to convey two meanings using one image. After many hours of talking to the twins, of videotaping them and looking through scores of family photographs, Hanson created this exhibition, which does, in fact establish Annette and Florine as two entities, but unexpectedly reconfigures the concept of individuality.

As the daughter of a twin, I find this terrain endlessly familiar and endlessly new. I'm told that when I was very little, my mother, on return from a trip to Europe with my father, arrived at my aunt's house to pick me up. I looked at my aunt, then at my mother--and then started bawling. Something about being the product of a shared life, about my mother and her sister's likeness in manner and attention and reaction, terrified and fascinated me.

I watched Hanson's installation of Annette and Florine, identically dressed and made up, each on their own video screen, in its entirety; I watched them telling the stories of their particular shared life, listening, finishing each other's sentences, ruining punch lines. The sisters switch screens at intervals, so it's nearly impossible to remember who is who, even though one has a narrower face, one has brighter makeup, and their noses are slightly different. But our deeply held beliefs about individuality aside, who is who seems beside the point. At times, this may be true even for the sisters; they tell a couple of stories--which they clearly find hilarious--about mistaking a mirror image for each other.

But Twin is not just a biological oddity trotted out for metaphorical purposes. In Hanson's hands the experience of twinness becomes an idea about wholeness and identity. There are installations that directly reference Annette and Florine--assemblages of photographs and possessions--but there is also a wonderful trio of sculptures that considers the twins as an abstraction. Two Halves/Two Wholes is a wire horn shape split by two pieces of mirrored glass hinged in the middle, so that the reflections in the glass create two whole cornucopias. The visual allusion is clear, but the use of surveillance glass adds an element of voyeurism, of seeing from one soul to another. In Phantom Pain, an image of two hands with linked pinkies (a tender reference from the video installation, which should make all but the most heartless weep inside) is projected onto suspended folds of translucent purple fabric. The image becomes more and more diffuse on each subsequent fold, by the last unidentifiable, but still there as the title suggests.

The self submerged in the other, and the artist submerged in the two: a lovely example of an artist turning her powers onto the lives of others. I was not as won over by the assemblage of personal items and the altered photographs that turned other people into twins of themselves as I was by the sculptures, video, and hundreds of photographs hung from the ceiling like strands of genetic material. It's more exciting to see Hanson, known mostly for her work of meticulously sewn-together rose petals, flex her conceptual muscles around two living beings. This is generous work, a subject mined to optimal effect.