Harmony Hammond: FRINGE: SITE SANTA FE

Harmony Hammond's solo exhibition FRINGE at SITE SANTA FE, Santa Fe, NM. 

The institution's press release follows: 

Harmony Hammond’s work rejects figuration yet evokes the body at every turn—implying a topography of its clefts and folds barely contained by the skin of paint. FRINGE presents a selection of the New Mexico-based artist’s work from the last ten years, featuring large-scale paintings in the shades of bone, buff, ochre, black, and bloodred she favors. From a distance these works appear near-monochrome, but up close more colors are secreted within the rents and tears of each tactile surface. These hues—suppressed yet abiding—assert what Hammond calls “material agency.” “It’s about what’s hidden,” she has said, “what’s revealed, buried, muffled, pushing up from underneath.” Hammond incorporates the texture of life to make abstraction a vessel for social content: “I welcome the world outside the painting’s edge into the painting field.”

Edges have long been structuring agents in Hammond’s work across media, and her paintings are built up from pieces of frayed cloth and coarse burlap that shows its seams—doused in pigment that serves primarily as an adhesive, a way to hold it all together. Straps, grommets, and lengths of cord are further means of attachment: tacit bids for connectivity. Hammond frequently incorporates found textiles to topple the hierarchies of fine art and craft, embracing materials and processes often linked to the domestic sphere. These recent works are an extension of her trailblazing feminist and queer art of the 1970s, which sought to reclaim abstraction for gendered politics and those on the margins. The exhibition’s title, FRINGE (both a noun and a verb), reaffirms that pull toward the periphery over the mainstream, drawing energy from the outer limits of what one can think and do. Formalist yet avidly handmade, muscular yet vulnerable, Hammond’s works are poised between unraveling and a hard-won cohesion that is rife with metaphoric potential. “I think of it as a kind of survivor aesthetic: one of rupture, suture, and endurance.”