From traditional abstract painting to more experimental frameworks, Mid-Atlantic Abstraction is not a survey of abstraction but a gathering of projects by select artists who have a connection to the region and make work loosely under the header. In 1970, two months before he died, noted abstract painter and sculptor Barnett Newman said in an interview with Emile de Antonio in the documentary film Painters Painting, “I was asked what my painting really means in terms of society, in terms of the world, in terms of the situation…Because to the extent that my painting…was an open painting, in the sense that it represented an open world—to that extent I thought, and I still believe, that my work denotes the possibility of an open society, of an open world…” Abstraction then refers to a fluid space where the contemplation of shape, form, sound, and color happens without rules, or guidance, but in the experience itself.

A multimedia exhibition of several projects—including photographs, video, shared archives, and sculptural installations—representing over 35 years of personal and cultural investigation toward processing ideas of home, exile, the traumas of war, and the endurance of identity and memory. Largely based on archives and memories of El Salvador during the Civil War, Hasbun’s work coalesces rediscovered personal and community artifacts into transient works of reconciliation where universal truths about war, death, and legacy are rendered into new work marking the presence and continuum of a rich cultural diaspora.