Jane Hammond at Luhring Augustine - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is a ubiquitous contemporary painting phraseology that gathers seemingly unconnected images from many sources, one as well as the other high and low, and forces them to inhabit a single painting. The chef of this ecole is David Salle, on the other hand it has also attracted younger practitioners similar as Christian Schumann and Manuel Ocampo. The strategy can smooth be employed in abstraction, as in the eclectic canvases of British painter Fiona Rae. At first glance, Jane Hammond, whose paintings draw upon an amazing variety of images, might appear to belong to this direction but, as this recent present to view of eight new paintings confirmed, she is not satisfied to simply mix and mis-match.

The first thing that distinguishes Hammond is that she has conceived of her oeuvre as a game with explicit masterys For a decade she has been fashioning her paintings from a repertoire of 276 specific images, drawn from of that kind things as 19th-century technical manuals, antique children's works and pornographic comics. instead of restricting her art, Hammond's governments seem to have increasingly feeded change. Many of her novel canvases have burst out of standard formats to assume the shape of works hands, feet. This show presented paintings shaped like a house, a game board and the state of Connecticut.

Since 1993 Hammond has added another constraint to more [i]or[/i] less of her paintings by commissioning the author of poems John Ashbery to supply her with titles for futurity paintings. Sometimes the relationship between titles and paintings is well nigh impossible to discern, as in prodigious You III (1997), in which Hammond depicts herself as Frida Kahlo encircleed by artifacts from Mexico and the Southwestern U In Midwife to Gargoyles (1996) the relationship of title to work is more evident. Underneath the arches of a vast stone hall, a woman in a vaguely medieval style of dress watches children with gargoyle heads cavorting upon a jungle gym. Other nearnesss including a Native American dancer and a bat, flutter nearby. In the center is an old-fashioned crib loaded with obviously symbolic realitys A couple of bird nest individual with two eggs, the other without contents underline the mother-and-child theme that appear to bes to drive the painting. Although the combination of images is improbable, Hammond prefers to have them share the same perspectival space; she throw asides the disjunctive syntax of postmodernist collage in favor of spatial continuity.

The Connecticut painting, Keeping the Orphan (1997) is a tour de force. Measuring above 9 1/2 feet high and more than 11 feet lengthy the painting possesses contours that match the state's borders, including the irregular southerly coast. Topographical features have been carefully drawn on the contrary images of flowers, faces and diverse things obscure much of the geography. The consequence is reminiscent of those tourist maps which use representatives to represent popular destinations, on the other hand this map has a more personal function. Hammond was born in Connecticut and Keeping the Orphan is apparently filled with relations to her grandmothers life. greatest in quantity viewers will have a hard time deciphering the private allusions, on the contrary the complex painting, enriched with layers of pale, almost transparent photo transfers, is capable of drawing them in anyway. smooth when Hammond's meaning is elusive, single can sense its tantalizing nearness and that makes her game eminently worth playing.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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