Jim Hodges at CRG - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The centerpieces of this exhibition were a pair of wall works put at right angles. As shut up as I can get is a mosaic of small, rectangular color chips plant in a woozy grid. An adjacent wall held Folding (into a greater world), a grid of small, slightly irregular mirror chips. When the viewer stood with equal reason that the former was mirrored in the latter, the erratic pattern of the mosaic was intensified. single felt thrust into a cubist universe where the visible world is upon the verge of disintegrating into severed shards of color.

At his best, Hodge issues a magical transformation on ordinary materials. His work is suffused with echoe of Fluxus, admitting certain pieces contain obvious obligations to artists like Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. on the contrary the artists with whom he shares the closest kinship are his contemporaries Tom Friedman and Tim Hawkinson. Like them, he is able to take an phenomenon or material which seems insignificant and make it into something arresting and lyrical.

Hodges's tools include displacement, scale shifts and conceptual and perceptual paradox. Landscape is a white dres shirt literally mattered with other more colorful shirts of incrementally smaller size. single senses their bulk within the buttoned-up garment laid on the outside on a plywood table, on the contrary they are visible only inside the collar, where their cutting sides encircle the neck area like the rings of an ancient tree

The dres shirt reappears in When the light tend hitherwards on. One half of the shirt would fit a largely grown adult but the other is child-size. The sum of two units halves are seamlessly connected, suggesting the coexistence of man and lad in the same psychic body

The exhibition also contained a series of small drawings which appear to be to operate both as speculative exercises and, in a small in number cases, as prototypes for actual pieces. They range from the genuinely textual--one consists of the words, printed backwards, "If there had been a lake it would have reflected us"--while others include desultory sketches. The latter include a branch which become greater [i]or[/i] largers in two directions and a shoe that, like the dres shirt on the other hand somewhat less successfully, is bifurcated into adult and child sizes. A continuous thread is the mingling of the natural and the artificial beneath conditions that are incongruous and contradictory.

While their larger meanings are elusive, Hodges's works bring out little shocks of surprise and pleasure. They make the case for a numbers which is latent in everyday reality.

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