Search the Collection - Addison Gallery

☰ Open Filter >>

Jane Hammond , b. Jun 27, 1950

Players

1992
38 1/2 in. x 36 1/8 in. (97.79 cm x 91.76 cm)

Medium and Support: graphite, solvent transfers, color photocopy, crayon, linoleum block prints, rub

Credit Line: gift of Klaus Kertess (PA 1958)

Accession Number: 2003.26

Commentary

The image world in all its diversity, multiplicity, and fluidity of meaning is the stage for the enactment of Jane Hammond’s art. Primarily a painter, she also makes many drawings and prints that despite their visual variety and complexity are all created using a fixed lexicon of 276 stock images. Collected from magazines and books and then Xeroxed, numbered, and stored in her studio they include such things as igloos, board games, floating heads and eyes, and bones. Using a variety of techniques to explore the ways that images can mean different things in different contexts, Hammond typically begins by creating a sheet from glued-together pieces of papers on which she then builds layered fields of transfers, paint, rubbings, and rubber stamps. Cut-outs are moved around and swapped in and out until out of this roiling stew a more formed thought emerges. For Hammond that thought typically tends to be hand painted and to take center stage. In this drawing it is a large, bold running figure, originally an illustration for a “how to” book on sculpture culled from the artist’s image bank. Like a magician pulling magic out of a hat, Hammond draws a seemingly endless amount of inspiration and invention from this small but powerful cache of images.

For me these drawings are the visual equivalent of thinking out loud. They begin without a plan and end up as they are. You could call them free-associative, although it’s increasingly complicated as to what the word “free” means in that context. They are built of different layers (and techniques) that happen sequentially and each is an intuitive response to the images, signs and marks that are there. At some point all of these rhymes, skips, jumps, consonances, dissonances, etc. hover together in a charged way. They are like flow-charts. Thinking diagrams. And by thinking I mean everything—cognition, emotion, goosebumps.

Exhibition List

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

Art, Artists, and the Addison: Building a Collection Addison Gallery of American Art , 3/30/2004 - 7/31/2004
Eye on the Collection Addison Gallery of American Art , 9/1/2016 - 3/19/2017
Eye on the Collection Addison Gallery of American Art , 4/1/2017 - 7/30/2017
4 x 4 Addison Gallery of American Art , 9/1/2018 - 7/31/2019

Portfolio List Click a portfolio name to view all the objects in that portfolio

This object is a member of the following portfolios:

Exhibitions: 4 x 4

Your current search criteria is: Object is "Players".

This site facilitates access to the art and artifact collections by providing digitally searchable records for thousands objects. The information on these pages is not definitive or comprehensive. We are regularly adding artworks and updating research online. We welcome your comments.