Paintings by Jane Hammond:
The John Ashbery Collaboration, 1993-2001
April 7 ö June 2, 2002

Organized by the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, this exhibition focuses on New York artist Jane Hammondâs recent body of paintings, which were created over a seven-year period in a collaboration between the artist and American poet John Ashbery.Ê

In 1993 Jane Hammond commissioned Ashbery to create a set of unique titles that would act as catalysts for her paintings. Ashbery provided forty-four titles that employ his characteristically eclectic use of language, such as Confessions of a Fop, A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets, Midwife to Gargoyles,Freezer Burn and The National Cigar Dormitory. Since 1993 these titles have served as the initial inspiration for Hammondâs creative process.

Like all of Hammondâs work, these paintings cull imagery from a controlled iconographic pool of 276 pictorial representations. Hammondâs collection includes images drawn from texts such as nineteenth-century technical manuals, antique childrenâs books, manuals on magic tricks, botanical guides and pornographic comics. With the Ashbery collaboration, Hammond expanded the rules of her process by allowing the titles to provide the visual stimulus for her compositions. The relationships between the titles and the resulting paintings range from playfully evident to almost obscure, yet all derive from the lively intersection of language and image.

Hammondâs interest in this project extends from an ongoing philosophical approach to painting that challenges preconceived conventions about the medium itself. A central question for Hammond is how to align painting ö the oldest, most traditional of visual art forms ö with the incredible surfeit and constant assault of imagery that defines contemporary life: How can painting, an essentially static medium, accommodate a contemporary consciousness shaped by velocity?

Hammondâs heterogeneous lexicon and her fixed visual system allow her to de-center and deconstruct traditional notions of style. Her densely packed compositions convey differing universes simultaneously at work. Fragmentary yet fluid, her paintings are models that embrace closure and infinity, choice and chance, the archetype and the individuated. Hammond builds upon the heterogeneity of postmodernism with a rich, imaginative polyphonic self that both moves forward out of postmodernism and looks backward at painting throughout time.

This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue have been generously sponsored by American Greetings, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Fifth Floor Foundation, Jim Kempner Fine Art, Greg Kucera Gallery, Galerie Lelong, Lemberg Gallery, Sharon and Thurston Twigg-Smith, and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery. The presentation of the exhibition in Honolulu is supported by Sharon and Thurston Twigg-Smith and in part by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts through appropriations from the Legislature of the State of Hawaiâi. Additional support has been provided by American Airlines, The Aston Waikiki Beachside Hotel and CSX Lines.