Harmony Hammond and Ivens Machado: auroras

Occupying two sunlit floors of a modernist house, this pairing of an American artist and a Brazilian one unfolded with striking clarity and spatial balance. Although contemporaries, the two artists never met, but their works converge across their distinct artistic and sociopolitical landscapes. Harmony Hammond, born in Chicago in 1944, was a pivotal figure in the emergent feminist discourse of early 1970s New York. Ivens Machado, who was born two years earlier in southern Brazil and died in Rio de Janeiro in 2015, confronted the vulnerability and brutality of both the human body and the materials he manipulated against Brazil’s unstable political backdrop, oscillating among military dictatorships, authoritarian civilian regimes, and glimpses of democracy. The exhibition emphasized how both practices, anchored in accumulation and repetition, address the desiring body and its defiance against oppressive political structures.

In Machado’s forceful sculpture Untitled, 2006, fist-size stones wrapped in chicken wire and joined by cement and steel cables arc downward under the weight of gravity. A probing viewer might have seen resemblances between this piece and key early works from Hammond’s oeuvre—for instance, Girdle, 1971, not in this exhibition, with its knotted acrylic-painted net bearing scraps of clothing donated by women friends. Suspended from two upper points, it sags into a parabola, just like Machado’s structure. Incorporating garments laden with personal histories to fuse biography and the social field, Hammond’s work resonates with Machado’s Untitled 20, 1973–2018, a black-and-white photograph documenting a performance in which the artist bound his face and body with surgical gauze, manifesting political suffocation under Brazil’s military dictatorship. The body impresses itself into material: The bandage both constricts and casts, like a mortuary mask.

Most of Machado’s sculptures evoke bodies—often swollen, distended, or tonguelike—yet they are made from rigid, recalcitrant materials. A parallel dynamic operates in Hammond’s work, which addresses the containment of desire and the patriarchal frameworks that seek to define what a woman is—for instance, in the most recent work in the exhibition, Voices II, 2023, a vertical canvas layered with weathered linoleum sourced from farm sites, scraped like a repeatedly repainted wall. On it, Hammond has inscribed Monique Wittig’s question from the essay “Paradigm” (1979): WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH OUR DESIRE? It’s a line to which Hammond has returned repeatedly since the 1990s, underscoring the poetic and political force of written language amid stratified memory.