A pair of passionate artists, one exhibit

Chaska artist Sara Lee Hanlon has found a use for at least some of the cast-off plastic detritus that drifts about our world.

"I have been known as the queen of garbage," she said. "I have the best-organized garbage you will ever find."

Hanlon cuts 2-liter soda bottles into plastic sheets and runs them through an industrial paper shredder to make confetti or plastic strips, which she sprinkles on her canvas to create texture. She turns the plastic rings from six-packs of soda into rugged shorelines. She melts plastic bags down into seaweed-like forms. To adhere various plastics to her surfaces, she uses a method that she has termed "polymeric fusion," which sometimes involves sticking a piece of art in a toaster oven or doing a bit of spot work with a cigarette lighter.

The resulting three-dimensional pieces are now on display at the Burnsville Performing Arts Center gallery. The two-person exhibition with South Dakota artist Geneva Costa, titled "Interaction and Fusion," runs through Sept. 8.

Hanlon's pieces often incorporate repetition of shapes and patterns and color palettes of either green, purple and blue ("relaxation colors," she said) or red, black and silver.

Costa's series of oil paintings celebrates color and the female form and, Costa said, was heavily influenced by futurism and German expressionist painter Franz Marc.

"I am naturally attracted to bright, bold color and interesting portrayal of motion," said Costa, an art instructor in Sioux Falls.

Because she favors vivid colors and large canvases, Costa spends hours mixing paint on a giant, nearly table-sized palette before starting. "Color theory is extremely important in painting, or at least it should be," she said.

About a decade ago, Costa said she had concentrated heavily on realism. "I got bored with it and decided to explore other ways to create art," she said. "This latest series really showcases that."

In this series, she wanted to create simple forms of the human figure. "I wanted to simplify and flatten the figures," she said, "while working with the basic elements of shape, line, and color."

Hanlon started edging away from realism in the '80s. She had spent years raising horses and running a gallery in Brainerd while she created and sold intricate wildlife woodcarvings and realistic paintings. Over the years, she started gradually shifting from representational work to collage and assemblage.

"I just did it to kind of stir things up a bit," she said.

She still does realistic work, as evidenced in her home-based gallery and gift shop in Chaska, where she sells miniatures of flowers and holiday ornaments with architectural renditions of the town's historic buildings. ("I am all over the place with what I do," she joked.) However, polymeric fusion, she said, is her "heart and soul."

This current series, Hanlon said, deals with themes of renewal and of connection. "It's about the global us," she said. "Inside of me is—alive and well—a counterculture hippie. I'm still the 20-year-old hippie."

While she still runs a gallery and teaches artists in her community, Hanlon has spent the past few years focusing primarily on her fine art.

"My ultimate goal," she said, "is to die with my face in a palette."

Liz Rolfsmeier is a Twin Cities freelance writer.