Chris Hassig (1987-) is an artist and community leader in Carbondale, Colorado.

Growing up with a pencil in hand, a fascination with maps, and an unbridled imagination, at thirteen Chris began inventing and mapping a fictional country he called Saiopor. The project continued in a secret sketchbook throughout his high school and college years, as the pages became ever more detailed, sophisticated, and palimpsestic. The ambition to fit entire cities within a 9 x 12 page incidentally honed a fine drafting technique, which he occasionally turned toward nature during backpacking trips into the Colorado and Wyoming Rockies.

With a sketch of a patch of grass outside the Johnson art building at Middlebury College, Chris delved into the complexity and detail of nature by closely examining and drawing, blade by blade, a ubiquitous and seemingly banal American subject: a grass lawn. As the ink grass drawings later became an easter-egg laden studio project and grew in scale, Chris pushed them towards pattern and abstraction rather than botanical illustration. The composition of the drawings evolved from simple horizons into geometric forms intended to revolutionize the aesthetic impact of the work from a distance. This achieved a simultaneous feat of calm minimalism and evolving complexity, depending on how close one came to the drawing.

A printmaking apprenticeship at Mixit Print Studio in Somerville, MA in 2012, 2013 and 2014 finally cracked open the sketchbook and let its subject matter out into a more public format. One culmination of the apprenticeship was an ambitious 4’ x 6’ map of Ralesis, the capital city of Saiopor, composed of eight etched copper plates. During a 2016 printmaking residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO, Chris expanded the map to 12 panels (4’ x 9’) and began developing a project to describe and illustrate the neighborhoods of Ralesis in an increasingly novelistic way. In 2019, Ralesis was further expanded to 24 panels (8’ x 10.5’).

Side projects with cyanotypes, painting, and collage during the Mixit apprenticeship allowed Chris to explore looser, more wabi-sabi processes that would find their way into both the drawings and printmaking techniques used on the maps. Chris also began using sewn elements in some of his printing projects as a way to reintroduce the direct hand into the work.

The latent abstraction in the grass drawings became more overt as Chris pushed beyond grass into a more evocative realm, using both diverse and repetitive mark making and mixed media to create abstract drawings that simultaneously suggest geology, landscape, and atmosphere. Chris continues to learn from nature to explore this progression — mixing new media, embracing mistakes, exploring incomplete erasures, and looking to the source as much as possible.

Encompassing his art practice, Chris is an elected member of the Board of Trustees for the Town of Carbondale, a DJ at KDNK Community Radio, a member of the Carbondale Creative District planning group, an avid telemark skier, backpacker, packrafter, occasional gardener, boombiker with the Carbondale Full-Moon Cruise, and noisemaker/singer with the Rhizomatic All-Stars.