In Elias Hansen’s work, glass objects, including beakers, test tubes, and flasks—some found, others specially made, many brightly colored—are assembled with other secondhand items and light fixtures, often on wooden shelving, to suggest alchemical systems and processes of distillation. References to industrial-age apothecaries, the grit of basement meth labs, and Color Field formalism are often embedded in Hansen’s material compositions. In the work’s titles, jabs of morbid profundity are usually softened by a certain ordinariness, as with A handful of nothing, 2013: brown beer bottles presented on wooden shelves sprayed red, with a red flag hanging overhead.

But this softness gave way to a rougher edge in Hansen’s latest exhibition, “You can cry all you want, but it ain’t changing shit,” which presented all new work. One room was filled with totemic assemblages on sometimes trapezoidal shelving systems that read like object poems, including 10 pounds says you’re fucked. (all works 2014), in which a curved twenty-cent euro coin is positioned on the top of a shelf that also features, among other items, a small perfume bottle and a hand-blown glass horse (apparently one of the first exercises glassblowers are schooled in). A second room was left unlit, save for a chandelier Hansen fashioned especially for the show (one for each room), so as to present more complex assemblage systems that feature light bulbs. These included Take a nap, this one ain’t changing soon, in which two shelves had a light hung between them; a beaker had been placed on each, with a crack pipe on one positioned just over an erotic playing card depicting the smiling face of a woman with cum around her mouth.

All the work on view evidenced a kind of pathos-infused pessimism with regards to the zeitgeist (that twenty-cent euro points to capitalism’s crisis), as encapsulated in the title of one piece, Fuck you. And Everything. Aside from glass, the connecting visual thread seemed to be those erotic playing cards. One assemblage presented in the first room, I’m sure you’re sad. So shut the fuck up., included—among glassware and rusted nails—a syringe containing the rolled-up image of a blonde giving a tit-wank gazing out through the glass imprinted with the legend MULTIFIT, MADE IN U.S.A. In this context, glass forms—from the small, Brancusi-esque totem in one composition that, all of a sudden, clearly resembled a dildo, to the slim tubes inserted into long beaker or bottle necks, many of which curve into bulbous tips to look like penis heads—took on more perverse connotations. This all added another dimension to the technique of glassblowing, which was described in the exhibition materials as an act of working that, “although short in itself, reflects both technical understanding and muscle memory.”

There was clearly a double entendre going on, as expressed in both the title of this exhibition and those of the works within it, from Even love’s got a long way to save you from this. to Of course, a lot of things are sad. But not as sad as this. In If fucking would’ve fixed this, I’d have fucked the shit out of you a long fucking time ago., an erotic playing card placed within a glass cylinder is positioned alongside objects that include a barber’s knife and a medium-size red vase with a form that looks like an abstracted Venus of Willendorf. These clues point to a tragicomic statement: Within capitalism—that multifit system—the experience of pleasure has become crudely distilled into an endless pursuit.

—Stephanie Bailey