Ladders to the Moon (first rung)
Maggie Haas

June 15 – 28, 2015

Exhibition Dates: June 15 – 28, 2015
Gallery Hours: Viewable 24 hours from window

As part of the 2015 Mix & Match Fundraiser Campaign and Benefit Party for the Royal NoneSuch Gallery, San Francisco based artist Maggie Haas created an installation in the gallery’s window titled Ladders to the Moon (First Rung). Interested in the informal, temporary and hand-built parts of architectural spaces, Haas’ work addresses the following questions: How do we build the spaces we live in? What are the stopgap repairs that we learn to live with permanently? How do our solidly built environments fade away and change, over decades and lifetimes? And what loss and possibility can be found in that messy transition from new to old?

Taking a cue from the informal nature of the window exhibition space, Haas experiments with the form of the ladder as a starting point. Ladders, which can serve as contingent architecture or as regular furniture/tools, are also rich in metaphor.  They can stand in, as ladders do, for ambition, escape, love and religion. Taking a cue from Georgia O’Keefe’s painting Ladder to the Moon (1958), Haas built a series of ladders leading to nowhere specific. The ladders are blue, like the one in O’Keeffe's surrealistic painting, and gesture to the way we sometimes project dreams onto prosaic objects. The open-endedness of where they lead is perhaps fantastical. And their non-functional, nonsensical shapes are a result of Haas' incremental swapping of practical considerations for aesthetic gestures.