SGC Chicago: Jane Hammond Key Note Lecture
The Artist Jane Hammond delivered a sharp and literate artist’s talk today in Chicago. She mentioned her long standing “title collaboration” project with the poet John Ashbery (he names the title, then she makes the work) but her discussion of her work sounded more like language poetry to me, with its procedural meditations on language & symbols in an open-source collage oriented process that would make DJ Spooky blush.
The Wonderfulness of Downtown, Jane Hammond published by ULAE in 1997
Jane began with her memory as a child of wandering through the local library and finding the Fiction section on one side of the room and the Non-fiction on the other, and stating that in today’s mediated world, with its “forest of signs”, the space between fact and fiction becomes strange. If that is true then she makes it look good and sound smart. Moving the conversation deftly from one body of work to the next Hammond explained that she chooses not to place any restrictions on the content she focuses on and not to “work at the altar of consistency.” By allowing herself total conceptual freedom she seems to have opened up a level of playfulness and honest academic inquiry into her studio practice. And by literally following her dreams and intuition she has found a vast trove of source material in printed ephemera, maps, star charts, natural taxonomies, and just about any thing else that catches the attention of her ample curiosity. With this multitude of source material she layers and juxtaposes, “conjugates meaning”, and builds systems within systems, mirroring the complexity that she sees in everyday life. She might just be creating a Lexicon of (her) life using her ever growing dictionary of signs. She ended by showing images from her “Fallen” project, that she rightly identified as her most ambitious project, cataloging all the names of US soldiers killed in the Iraq war by hand writing them on prints of scanned leaves she’s collected around the country. It is an awe inspiring work, even in reproduction.
Fallen by Jane Hammond, Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio
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