The first museum retrospective of the five-decade collaboration between artists Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, “Las Vegas Ikebana,” is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art. Hassinger’s experience working in a flower shop and Nengudi’s engagement with Japanese aesthetics inspired the show’s title, which reflects the artists’ shared appreciation of humor, pop culture, impermanence, and tradition. In tribute to the exhibition, Artforum this week revisits “Gravity and Grace,” Rachel Churner’s essay on the art of Maren Hassinger, published in the magazine’s November 2018 issue.
 
“Hassinger’s work refuses to gratify. Her art does not fetishize pain, nor does it demand sympathy. And she certainly does not make art as a salve, or as therapy,” writes Churner. “Rather than transforming dark and disturbing news into something transcendent, she seems to suggest with this work that we must weave the life we create from profound violence, anxiety, and sadness.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan