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In 2000, I came across a book in a Philadelphia bookstore that took my breath away. Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History by Harmony Hammond introduced me to the rich array of queer and feminist art being created by lesbian artists in real time. Discovering this history was incredibly meaningful.

Hammond has had a pioneering impact on art, in particular through her insistence on feminist and queer content in abstract work. Her influence on the feminist art movement has been profound: she cofounded AIR Gallery in 1972, was a member of the Heresies Collective, and curated the groundbreaking A Lesbian Show at the storied 112 Greene Street in 1978. I have followed her career since that vital discovery in the Philadelphia bookstore, but it wasn’t until her 2013 debut exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates that I had the opportunity to see her work in person. Her sculptural, near-monochromatic paintings make an indelible impression on me. They are raw, physical, strange, and evocative. Hammond insists upon a kind of somatic equivalency in her work. In her 2010 essay, “A Manifesto (Personal) of Monochrome (Sort Of),” reprinted in the exhibition catalog, she wrote: “The body is always near.”

Harmony Hammond, the artist’s second show at Alexander Gray Associates, opens on May 19. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to converse with Harmony about her work and process in anticipation of the exhibition.

Clarity Haynes: In your manifesto, you explicitly declare that your paintings “perform queerly.” I’m intrigued by that statement. How exactly do they do this?

Harmony Hammond: I was referring to the fugitive aspect of the dark blue/black paintings from 2009 to 2013 — the indeterminacy. Despite the materiality of the thick paint, you can’t quite locate color, surface, or space. Is it blue? Black? Metallic? Color shifts, at times appearing burnished or iridescent. In their refusal to be any one color, the paintings can be seen to occupy some sort of fugitive or outlaw space that rejects the narrative of monochrome painting, at the same time it refuses to look stereotypically queer. Thus we can say the paintings perform queerly.

CH: Can you tell us something about your working process?

HH: It is not clear how the paintings are made, but there are no tricks. They are simply painted. I apply brushstrokes in multiple directions so that light, hitting the ridges or marks made by the brush in the paint, causes some areas to read matte and some glossy. Patchy. These intentional irregularities — activating, agitating, or upsetting the surface — mirror the imperfections and experiences written upon our bodies. With the new paintings, content continues to emerge from the paint application. The surface texture of each painting is different, but there is a focus on how under-colors are revealed or push up from beneath and through the grommeted holes, disrupting what at first glance appears to be a minimalist monochrome grid painting.

CH: That makes sense. The active surface is very apparent in the works in your upcoming show. In “Things Various,” the surface is extremely brushy, choppy, agitated. I love this piece. It feels less contained than your other works, almost as if it is coming apart.

HH: I don’t think it is less contained, but it is more open than previous wrapped paintings. The surface is similar to earlier works, but there are fewer straps. The straps and ropes hang open; they are not tied up tight or blocking the viewer’s visual entrance into the painting space. The tracks of previous straps no longer needed are left like scars in the skin of paint; the painting holds itself together. The materiality of the paint has agency. The paint, not the straps, holds the painting body together.

The only painting in the exhibition that slightly suggests the possibility of coming apart is “Bandaged Grid #1.” Its fraying strips of leftover canvas are applied like bandages to the grid of grommeted holes — suggesting bodily wounds, but also an interruption of the narrative of the grid in modernist painting, and therefore of utopian egalitarian order. A precarity. The strips and the paint functioning as poultice, also suggest possibilities of holding together, of healing.

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Read full article at hyperallergic.com.

Queering Abstract Art with Wrapped, Grommeted, and “Roughed-Up” Paintings

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