JANE HAMMOND
Hammond never titles her pieces per se; instead she lists the numbers of the elements from her pictorial “alphabet” that appear in the work. The untitled piece referred to as “(234, 122, 137)” features an Asian-looking man standing on two glass bottles floating in an expanse of water. He’s showing us two different types of bird’s nests, holding one in each outstretched hand. The arrangement of bottles, nests, and man creates a curious narrative whose meaning we can only guess at. This inaccessibility might prove frustrating were it not for Hammond’s unique talent for juxtaposing brilliant colors. The man’s bright red tunic against the fiery red and orange background, painted with hundreds of quick, agitated brush strokes, fairly screams at us. But the cool blues of the water hold these molten shades in check, as does the black of the man’s pants. Hammond’s bold, intelligent use of color keeps us focused on the objects, challenging us to discover a coherent meaning.
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Hammond sometimes quiets her palette to reveal a touching sensitivity. In one painting a clown is enveloped in an impasto of beautiful off-white paint–indeed, he’s part of this gentle color field, for only his outline has been sketched in black paint onto its surface. Some areas of this muted expanse hold hints of pale green and yellow, while other areas have been randomly scratched. The clown, who seems a symbol of anonymity and loneliness, elicits empathy. This is decidedly Hammond’s most moving piece, but it too has a strange mystery: a floating red rose clearly has some relationship to the clown nearby, but what is it?
