Jenna Gilley, Associate Curator of Exhibitions
We all know the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Working in an art museum, I ascribe to this idiom, believing that the images on our gallery walls speak just as (if not more) to our human experience than words on a page. Images can convey meaning based on their cultural context, personal connection, and be infinitely recombined to change their meaning. Today’s Now on View post explores an artist who is a master of pictorial language.
Jane Hammond is a New York-based artist fascinated with collecting and documenting materials since she was a child. As a girl, she gridded her yard into 50-foot squares with string and made a catalog of all the enclosed rocks and trees in her notebooks. When she moved to New York in the late 1970s, Hammond took a teaching job in Baltimore–a 2.5 hour train commute–and continued to do so for ten years. She spent three nights a week at the library, researching whatever odd topic currently held her attention. Over time, she amassed an image bank, or “lexicon”, of more than 276 images from 19th-20th century books, including everything from puppetry and magic to scientific manuals and antique children’s books. Every image was assigned an arbitrary number and organized into files according to various themes (subject matter, size, or color). She limited her practice to using the specific images from this collection, whose differing arrangements would reveal alternative meanings, to create multiple narratives, similar to the restructuring of amino acids in DNA creating different genetic traits. For decades, Hammond limited her art to the image bank, leaving each piece untitled or named simply with a complex code of numbers that related to her unique database, like call numbers on library books.
In 1993, Hammond began working with poet John Ashbury, making 62 paintings based on titles suggested by the writer. Following this collaboration, she began to break her own rules, expanding her possible selection of colors to include every hue and shade, permitting different sizes and shapes of canvas, and adding different images and materials into her repertoire. The interplay between language and image became central to her work. Hammond became a well-known contemporary artist through the success of this series.
Full House, which is currently on display at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art as part of the Fantastic Realms exhibition, is a special bridge between Hammond’s limited so-called “early” period and her post-Ashbury years. Hammond started expanding her painting process into printmaking, working at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). Although only her second print, Full House already shows her mastery with the complex process of layering images. Hammond used a large picture file of collected clippings to construct a setting that offers viewers various readings. The print shows a multi-roomed house illustration in the center which slowly ascends, layer by layer, to expose interior rooms. Circling the house are a cast of kooky characters drawn from Hammond’s image lexicon, including repeated favorites such as a twirling ballerina (some with her own face), puppeteered clown, and man with a deer hat performing a ritual dance. Various vessels and furniture pieces also intersperse the scene, extracted from their normal interior setting.
This collaged visual imagery is similar to many of Hammond’s earlier paintings; however, its title, Full House, provides the viewer with a starting point for interpretation, unlike her previously untitled work. Perhaps this motley crew was too much for one house to handle, leading to an explosion of oddities. Perhaps Hammond was inspired by 20th century thoughts on psychology, as she once quoted in a lecture that she often thinks about the 1966 book, The Art of Memory, which she had to read in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The book describes a way to memorize a long story by imagining a house with many rooms and devising unique characters or objects to help remember the story’s chronology. Later in the same year this work was finished, Hammond would ask John Ashbery to assign titles to paintings she would create. A week later he faxed her a list of 44 titles, which he later said took him about four minutes to write: that’s 11 titles every 60 seconds! From “No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar” to “Do Husbands Matter?”, these titles helped contextualize Hammond’s peculiar scenes for viewers.
I’ll admit that when I initially added this print to the exhibition list I did not know much about the piece or artist. I simply looked at its large size (almost seven-foot height!) and humorous characters and thought, yep, that definitely pulls me into a different world. Curating is funny that way. Sometimes I will begin a show with a few pieces immediately in mind, which I know will convey my point perfectly, while others, like Full House, are a curious surprise. I may not have initially known about Hammond’s processes or inspirations yet, her inherent wit and talent for arranging disparate works into a narrative struck me. I imagined myself as a girl playing with my dollhouse, where everything from Barbie to lamps made out of muffin liners were found within it. To me, that is the purest form of fantasy: the sense of make-believe. There lies Hammond’s specialty: in setting the stage of characters but leaving the plot unfinished, viewers weave their own tales from the clues provided, allowing them to learn about themselves in the process.