Pace Prints is pleased to present Collaged Monoprints, an exhibition of new hand-colored monoprint drawings by Jane Hammond, created in the Pace Paper studios in Brooklyn, New York. This is Hammond’s fourth solo exhibition with Pace Prints. An opening reception will be held Thursday, January 24, 6-8pm.
A Room of One’s Own, the title given to each of the large-scale works in Hammond’s exhibition, describes the individuality of the depicted interior space based upon its invented composition, color and collaged elements. In this body of work, as always, Hammond works in a method of recombination, making an array of figures, animals and objects, combining and recombining them to create myriad and changing associations in each collage. All of this play occurs inside a recurring Renaissance-style room, with deep perspectival space. Each room is extensively hand-painted and contains up to seventy elements, individually cut out and collaged into the space. Hammond’s capacious hand-painting is combined with relief printing, linoleum block printing, etching, digital printing and rubber stamping in all of the works.
The widely-sourced and disparate elements in Hammond’s work are brought together in new and surprising combinations that create a string of associations in the viewer’s mind. These associations can vary extensively from piece to piece: for example, in one room there is a bear, in another a bear toy, in a third Picasso wears a bear suit, and in another there is a nod to Teddy Roosevelt and the Teddy Bear. Other elements in Hammond’s visual vocabulary include geishas, masquerade masks, jesters, hula girls, pinwheels, gems, crystals and circus balls. They exude multiple layers of meaning and associations, and the body of work as a whole provides insight into Hammond’s re-combinative semiotic process.
Hammond says, “I am interested in complexity, combining and context. I want to privilege freedom, curiosity and exploration over visual consistency. I use the found to speak of the fictional and the felt.”
Jane Hammond was born in 1950 in Connecticut and received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972. She earned her M.F.A from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1977. Hammond moved to New York City in 1980 and had her first solo exhibition in 1989 at Exit Art, NYC. She has had fifteen solo exhibitions in New York City as well as Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam and Paris, among others. In the past ten years she has had fourteen solo museum exhibitions at such venues as: the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the MCA Denver and The Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Hammond’s work is included in over fifty public collections including the MFA in Boston; MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Art Gallery. Hammond currently lives and works in New York City.
Founded in 1968, Pace Prints is a publisher of contemporary fine arts prints with three printmaking workshops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Since its founding, Pace Prints has collaborated in creating print editions with over 125 artists. Pace Prints is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA), and is affiliated with The Pace Gallery. Gallery hours at 521 West 26th Street are Tues-Fri, 10-6, and Sat, 11-6.