Infusing familiar with a deft touch of strange:  Haddaway Parsons open show

SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN, Pasatiempo

BY GUSSIE FAUNTLEROY

      If you threw an armful of things into the air and watched them tumble and stop as if stuck at odd angles in the sky, that’s about what life feels like to Ed Haddaway.

            It’s also what some of his sculpture feels like: colorful steel forms in improbable positions, slightly quirky shapes, things that make you smile and also make you shake your head in wonder.

            “What I really like is when I make something and it looks so familiar, and yet there is a strangeness about it,” Haddaway said in a phone conversation from his Albuquerque home.

            “There’s this dichotomy in life where things are super mundane and there’s a sameness to it but also this wild strangeness, that here we are alive and nobody can account for that.”

            Ever since he started working on sculpture for a show opening today at Horwich LewAllen Gallery, Haddaway has been looking straight in the face of life’s dichotomies and subconsciously including these experiences in his art, he said.

            His 81-year-old father accidentally set himself on fire in November and died about a month ago. At the same time Haddaway’s life has been a whirlwind of brand-new life, with his 15-month-old daughter taking center stage. The childhood memories bubbling to the surface of the sculptor’s mind these days -- a result of thinking about his father and being a father -- are reflected in his colorful, fanciful, inventive steel works as well as their titles such as Granddaddy, Daddy, and Me and It’s On The Wall Daddy; and other Dreams.

            Haddaway and Texas painter Scottie Parsons who shares the show with him will be at an artists’ reception from 5:30 to 7:30 today at Horwich LewAllen 129 West Palace Ave. The exhibit runs through April 29.

            Some of Haddaway’s pieces are big, like the 11-foot-tall Granddaddy, Daddy and Me with three leafless steel trees, sprouting from colored squares and diamonds that seem to float several inches over an accordion-like, unpainted steel form. Others are smaller, pedestal size.

            All of them, Haddaway said, are the kinds of things he wanted to create when he was 6, but didn’t have the materials or skill to make.

           He tried. Growing up in Fort Worth he was constantly out in the backyard, hammering pieces of wood and building things, inventing things.

            “My mother said when I was a little kid I went out and put a lot of sticks in a circle.” He recalled. “I was making a merry-go-round, and I thought if I had some music, the merry-go-round would go in circles.”

            Calling himself a fulltime dreamer and a “real introvert,” Haddaway said if he could he would spend all his time in childhood memories, even though they weren’t all carefree.

            “I had a real Leave it to Beaver, 50s, real upper-middle-class mother-at-home childhood, but it also had this intense darkness to it. It depends on how I look at it.” he said.

            Seeing both sides, he said means making playful colorful fun sculpture -- with an edge of oddness to it.

            Painter Scottie Parson’s has one childhood…

April 13, 1995