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Harmony Hammond

Inappropriate Longings

April 19–May 25, 2018

Inappropriate Longings, 1992, Mixed media

Inappropriate Longings, 1992

Mixed media

Dimensions variable

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail, Mixed media
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail, Mixed media
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail, Mixed media
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail, Mixed media
Inappropriate Longings, 1992, detail
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate LongingsInstallation view​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings
Installation view
​Alexander Gray Associates (2018)

Small Erasure #3, 1999, Mixed media

Small Erasure #3, 1999

Mixed media

In 3 parts, each: 10h x 8w inches

Lesbian Dreams, 1992, Mixed media

Lesbian Dreams, 1992

Mixed media

32.50h x 23w in (82.55h x 58.42w cm)

Untitled (Form of Desire), 1992, Mixed media

Untitled (Form of Desire), 1992

Mixed media

42.50h x 29.50w in (107.95h x 74.93w cm)

Untitled, 1995, Mixed media

Untitled, 1995

Mixed media

74h x 82w x 2d in

Buried Secrets, 1991, Mixed media

Buried Secrets, 1991

Mixed media

90h x 72w in (228.60h x 182.88w cm)

Untitled #1, 1998, Mixed media

Untitled #1, 1998

Mixed media

16h x 13.50w x 4.50d in (40.64h x 34.29w x 11.43d cm)

Press Release

Alexander Gray Associates presented its third exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond (b.1944), Harmony Hammond: Inappropriate Longings. Featuring an installation and a selection of mixed media paintings and works on paper, the exhibition highlighted the artist’s practice during the 1990s. These works’ use of materials as visual metaphors for desire, violence, place, and the effects of time, foul weather, and foul play continue Hammond’s ongoing project to “bring content into the world of abstraction.”

Hammond’s material metaphors referencing both the body and the landscape create “troubled sites,” what The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter has called “…. implied narratives of innocence lost through political, domestic, and psychological violation.” Combining oil paint, canvas, and paper with non-traditional materials such as latex rubber, linoleum, straw, leaves, and hair, along with weathered objects salvaged from abandoned farms, she constructs works that occupy a space between painting and sculpture while hinting at transgressions and violence within the domestic setting.

Central to the exhibition was the large tableaux Inappropriate Longings (1992). The installation combines a triptych of oil paint, latex rubber, and linoleum with a metal gutter, a water trough, and dried leaves attached to or placed in front of the painting. The words “goddamn dyke” incised into the skin-like latex of the triptych interject a violated bodily presence into the work that challenges both the heteronormativity of rural America and abstract painting. As Hammond writes, “There’s a sense that something happened, but what? The painting is material witness to a crime scene giving clues of events and actions not fully revealed.”

Hammond continued this evocative material experimentation in other works in the show. In the diptych Untitled (1995), for example, she used straw and red paint to call up multiple bodies almost touching. Writing about the work, she states, “It’s about the meeting place, the crack, the space between. The tension of uneasy juxtaposition. A site of negotiation.” Cumulatively, the works in the exhibition continue Hammond’s post-minimal engagement with materials and process and a survivor aesthetic that began with her fabric sculptures in the early 1970s while also anticipating her materially informed paintings of the last decade.