“I like to go to the very root of something,” says Channing Hansen, who was born in 1972 in Los Angeles and raised there. So when he found himself drawn to a fiber-based practice, Hansen joined a spinner’s guild and learned to source the material, dye, blend, and spin the fibers, and add twist—which creates energy. He then knits like a spider writing code. Because Hansen comes from a Fluxus background—his grandfather Al Hansen was a founder of the avant-garde movement—he focuses on expressing his fascinations. Hansen calls himself an “armchair physicist.” What does that mean? He explores dimension through his fiber work, and lets algorithms determine outcomes of color and stitch. The works of art are gorgeously hued and beguilingly abstract, lacy and synaptic. —Laura Jacobs