“Carrie Crane: The Lise Hoffman Archive (a fiction)”, on view at the Boston Sculptors Gallery through January 25, animates Lise Walker Hoffman (1934-2019), a fictional young woman of Crane’s imagination. Acting as her alias, a conduit of sorts, Crane experiments with sculpture, construction, prose, mixed-media and technology. What is presented is a robust background of Lise Hoffman’s “life” from her early adolescence into her 70s through a collection of found objects, journals and letters, contributions and accolades, and scientific and creative endeavors.
In her artist statement, Crane reflects on the moment of inception of the project and character. As she played with a strange machine of sorts that her husband brought home one day, she said, “After much fooling around, I proclaimed — as an artist I am allowed such a privilege — it to be an incubator for nascent planets. This led to the query of who might have built and used this instrument?” And thus, Lise Walker Hoffman was created.
Lise Walker Hoffman was born in 1934 in New York City; she was the child of an American chemist and an Austrian physicist. The couple, who met during Lise’s mother’s time in university, emigrated to the United States during the rise of the Nazi regime. In New York, Lise experienced a rather affluent but independent upbringing and education, accompanied by her Polish nanny, Beulah.
At Boston Sculptors Gallery, “The Lise Hoffman Archive (a fiction)” is presented in a way that follows the fiction of the exhibit — the placards and acknowledgments and rights directly belonging to the fictional Global Institute of Ambiguous Instruments (GAIA).