Harmony Hammond at Linda Durham

Harmony Hammond continues to balance the feminist be of importance tos that have been evident in her art since the early '70 with a highly modernist esthetic. In her latest works, she reinterprets universals of femininity and gender by dint of means of devices which conflate the symbolic and the formal.

This exhibit which inaugurated Linda Durham's handsome of recent origin space, presented several different bodies of Hammond's work. Among the greatest in quantity striking were a group of large-scale abstract paintings incorporating base objects that recall the tasks assigned to women in rural environments. These external realitys are meant to be seen as types of both hardship and ritual beauty. For example, in Untitled (Buckets) an 8-foot-high abstract painting from 1995 a kettle and eight weather-worn, rusted pails bearing remnants of brilliant color hang from nails upon the work's surface. Over thickly impastoed crimson red thick vertical trails of white and orange paint move swiftly down the canvas. Physical toil is evok not sole by the pails but also through the charged repetition of brushstrokes and by dint of arduous scraping. Related themes are introduced in Speaking Braids (1998); this painting depicts a woman's head with an intricate stream of braiding flowing from her jaws implying the ways that creative expression may be silenced or displaced.

Particularly effective were a number of ambiguous, self-reflexive works that present the appearance to embody existential themes. A series of three-dimensional rectangular constructions of close tightlyed straw include random patches of saturated blood-r paint, suggesting the couple violence and birth. Striking in format and easy in mind these pieces are singularly evocative of Anselm Kiefer's new work.

The greatest in quantity intriguing piece in the exhibit was a large-scale untitled piece of paint and latex upon linen from 1996. Against a pale ocher-brown background, the torso of a voluptuous woman is described by the agency of the layers and folds of translucent, flesh-toned latex. Angled against the canvas is a tall metal kennel pipe on which is impaled a crudely moulded female head made of cast rubber. With the detached head implying that material substance and brain cannot function as individual this work seems to proffer Hammond's ironic summation of ongoing esthetic and social conflicts.

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