New York artist, poet collaborate on feast for imagination

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Reviewer

Like Alice in Wonderland, New York painter Jane Hammond went down a rabbit hole in 1993 that opened into a new world. Her creative expansion began when she asked the Mad Hatter (poet John Ashbery) to come up with a list of titles for a body of work from which she would make paintings.

With this exhibit, The Contemporary Museum has, rather puckishly, extended an invitation to anyone hungry for a visual and cognitive feast to swallow the pill that makes you larger and the one that makes you small, and follow your own white rabbit through the retrospective show. Just hold onto your hat and rely on Hammond's resilience as your guide.

Titles such as "A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets," "Midwife to Gargoyles," "Irregular Plural," "Bread and Butter Machine," "Contra Zed," "No One Can Win At The Hurricane Bar," and "The Stocking Market" show that Ashbery (like Hammond) enjoys unexpected juxtaposition.

Hammond, an intelligent and loquacious Postmodern-plus artist, works within her own system. She has painted (since the late '80s) from a lexicon of 276 images, which she also refers to as "information," collected from her extensively diverse library (which includes old issues of Popular Mechanics, books on medieval alchemy, woodcraft, children's stories, Mayan knot-tying, coloring books, and old gardening catalogs, to name a few).

"I wanted to play with putting them together in alternate ways, like recumbent DNA," she said. "I wanted to emphasize heterogeneity and the elasticity of me. That is how a given image in a given context can stretch in form or core or sexuality. I think of my work as a fiction woven of facts."

In this system of working, she separates the images from language in order to facilitate free association. Hammond's painterly world is suspended in saturated and muted colors, a matrix of media, playful pictorialism and a sense of ritual.

"Sore Models" was the first title to catalyze in her mind. The "Sore Models II"(1994) on display is a large diptych (88 by 81 inches overall) of foot-shaped canvases. While painting it, she realized that things didn't have to be the same to be a pair — an abstract circuitry could connect the two images. The electricity is literally illustrated in the drawing of a homemade battery (remember elementary science classes?) on a blue foot.

Hammond is also a master of hidden details. "The red right foot has copper leaf underneath it, and the blue left foot has silver leaf underneath it," she noted.

In attempting to grasp her metaphors, you enroll in Hammond's association game — a game that jump-starts your mind into connecting disparate images (and words as well, as in "Irregular Plural #5") which may continue when you leave the museum. As you may have already noticed, some of the titles produced multiple paintings.

Games appeal to Hammond. A game board she found on the streets of Paris became inspiration for "Mad Elga." "RSVP" incorporates entertainment images and calls attention to the fact that a painting is a kind of entertainment.

In one of her more theatrical (if that is possible) paintings, "The Soapstone Factory #5," a stylized sculptor's studio — based on architectural and renaissance drawings, and a series of prints of 19th-century theater — sets up a balancing act. In this room, "Everything is connected to birds," she said. "It is thrilling to make art that is about the process of art being made."

A man with a feathered hat holding a birdhouse on a stick is poised on an egg; an Indian goddess with a spoked wheel on her head dances on a fried egg; and an ostrich with an igloo on its back stands amid hammers and scatterings of soapstone pieces. The arches are draped with a drying line suspended with black figures. Granted, rooms have psychological contexts, but Hammond's juxtapositions are poetic as well.

"Whooooo are youuuuu?" asks the caterpillar of Alice. Hammond answers in the powerhouse painting, "Wonderful You II." She is Jane Claus, Jane Christ, Jane of Arc, Baby Jane

"I am taking a playful and ironic approach to this title," she said. "I am turning me into you, and I am turning myself into the many. On a philosophical level the painting is about the multiplicity of selves that we all are."

For Hammond, the easiest part of being a painter is getting the ideas. "They are not from dreams, with few exceptions," she said. "They are from right before you fall asleep , or at 5 in the morning when you can't get back to sleep. In many cases the idea for the painting comes to me completely, almost like a slide in a projector."

There is one Ashbery painting left half-finished in her studio. After its completion, Hammond will start a new body of work, richer from the collaboration with Ashbery. It marked the first time she made a two-part painting, used new shapes of canvas and a new palette of colors, and worked with materials other than oil paints.

This exhibition is a riot of stimulation and a perfect conduit for channeling creative ideas.

'Los Carpinteros: Transportable City'

Three thousand pounds of aluminum tubing and nylon tents have been constructed on the lawns of The Contemporary Museum into "Los Carpinteros: Transportable City." Three amigos from Cuba — Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto

Rodriguez — are Los Carpinteros (the carpenters), and have worked as a team for 11 years. They met while studying at Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte.

The 10 tents that make up the city have traveled from Havana, New York, San Francisco, Spain, Germany and Los Angeles to

Honolulu and were "inspired and designed as a Western city that you can carry with you everywhere you go," said Arrechea. "You don't have to leave your city behind."

The city is based on minimum human needs — a church, capitol, jailhouse, military fortress, apartment building, hospital, lighthouse, university, factory and warehouse. Los Carpinteros intend to add more buildings such as a museum and an opera house.

You can see a collection of architectural drawings (some humorous) for the city and future tent designs in the John Young Gallery of the Museum.

'Exquisite Vessels III'

Recent Acquisitions for The Contemporary Museum's Collection . Acquired through the Sibyl Heide Fund.

James Jensen, associate director and chief curator of The Contemporary Museum, acquired the pieces for "Exquisite Vessels III" over the past few years from annual funds donated by the Sibyl Heide Fund. His criteria for the selection process are simple. First, each work has to derive from or address the vessel tradition, whether functional or not. Second, each work has to have some technical finesse, be exquisite in some way and resonate with creative vision.

The show has a handful of artists from different countries as well as a few homegrowns.

Local-born-and-raised Peter Schlech's "Halia's Cup # 3" is a graceful, boat-shaped offering in ebony veneer and black lacquer. Adrian Saxe, who was raised in Hawai'i and presently lives in California, is head of ceramics in the art department of UCLA and also an elected fellow of the American Craft Council. His vessel "Untitled Ewer (St. Suwanne)" (1995), was inspired by a lava rock found while he was diving in Hawai'i. This rock became a pendant studded with red faceted stones that is attached to the body of the vessel, which is slip-cast from a hand of raw ginger.

"No Fear! No regrets!" writes Adrian Saxe, a man who believes that "One of my challenges as an artist and educator is to lead young artists to aggressively investigate alternatives ... and entice artists to pursue their innermost curiosity about what is possible."

The possibilities for Donald Derry are many. This Washington-based artist-magician has the ability to turn a chunk of Chinese elm so thinly, and lacquer the finish so smoothly, that it looks like glass and weighs only 10 ounces.

The 17 artists in this show definitely demonstrate what an exquisite vessel is.

'Intuitive Painting II'

Students from Timothy Ojile's "Intuitive Painting II" class at the Academy Art Center are presently exhibiting works that, in keeping with the Hammond-Ashbery collaboration, were created from titles that were not their own. Each student was instructed to randomly draw up to three titles (made up by Ojile) out of a box and create the work in two dimensions.

"These parameters turned out to be a good disciplinary tool," said Ojile. "Many simple concepts grew complex in planning and execution. Students met difficult challenges in their individual style."