Layers of midnight-toned Prussian blue oil paint suture the horizontal straps that Harmony Hammond wrapped around Cinch V, one of her two near-monochrome paintings in Shadow and Light. In the center, a string laces back and forth through grommeted holes at each end of the straps. Untied at the bottom, the strings hang unevenly off the edge of the painting.“Cinch V is torso-sized,” Harmond says from her Galisteo home. “The straps suggest ribs. But the straps are loose. The painting is not about binding, bandaging, or bondage, but rather about the possibility of constriction or binding. There’s a kind of tension. Were the strings just untied and loosened? Or might they be pulled tight like a corset?”
In Witness, a grid of grommeted holes embedded in the light, buff-colored surface opens a pictorial space, suggesting eyes or body orifices. Referencing an area beneath the surface, they ask, “Who or what has been covered up, buried, or erased?”
Such questions have long informed Hammond’s socially engaged abstract paintings. She examines how materials and the ways they are used bring content into abstract work — especially the body. For example, the canvas for Witness with its seamed flaps casting shadows on the surface and the grommeted straps in Cinch V come from repurposed worn-out Aikido mat covers. Hammond studied and taught the Japanese martial art for 36 years; the canvas literally bears a history of bodies falling on and rolling over it, including Hammond’s.
An artist, writer, curator, and university professor, Hammond was a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, where her pieces have been included in three group exhibitions and two mini-solo shows in the alcove spaces.
“Because of the museum’s extensive and important historical collections, there has been minimal time and space to feature the work of contemporary artists,” she says. “Vladem Contemporary will change all that. Aside from continuous theme-based exhibitions of contemporary work, it will be able to present retrospectives of work by individual artists and special projects.
“This is important because the New Mexico Museum of Art is a collecting museum. Contemporary work can not only be seen at the Vladem, but also acquired as part of the New Mexico Museum of Art’s ongoing permanent collection.”
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