MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
July 24, 2023
This week we recognize Hollis Hammonds Hollis Hammonds, and her multimedia body of work that reminisces on past experiences and explores disaster, both environmental and man-made.
"My House: The Storm," 2014 (above) was a wall installation of assembled drawings included in the exhibition titled “Drawn In / Drawn Out,” at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas. The exhibition was made up of works by contemporary artists who challenge traditional concepts of drawing. Over the last decade drawing has become recognized as a stand-alone medium and like other art media, in this age of cultural and technological flux and innovation, the definition of drawing has expanded to include 3-D and conceptual forms. The works explored new drawing strategies that include site-specific installations, wall drawings, multilayered compositions and atypical approaches to the art of drawing."
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“Wasteland/Wonderland,” 2016 (above) was a solo exhibition at the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, made up of installation and video projection. In this exhibit, Hammonds asked spectators to reconsider the objects we amass after they are transformed by disaster. Something she was forced to consider after her childhood home burned down, she addresses this disaster in a number of her works. With a strong interest in narrative and storytelling, the video projection in this exhibition was meant to engage the viewer to feel the turmoil and drama of the burning house. While the sculptural piece was meant to engage the view through tactile interaction.”
“Homecoming,” 2019 (above) is a collection of objects that directly reflect Hammonds childhood, including the forest behind her home filled with detritus and junk. Her Depression era parents’ had a tendency to collect trinkets (ceramic poodles, dolls, figurines, etc.) and save anything of value (including plastic bottles, rusty nails, old cars, wood, metal, and so on). In this work, Hammonds again addresses the emotion surrounding a fire that burned her family home to the ground when she was just 15 years old.“
Awake in the Dark, 2021 (above) is a multimedia exhibition resulting from a collaboration between visual artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West, aka Hammonds + West. The pieces begin what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to the environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. In these works, the distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse. Hammonds and West invited viewers to see their own part in making the physical world and, thus, the future.
“The River Entered my Home,” 2022 (below) was a collaborative exhibit shown at CCAD (Columbus College of Art and Design), Columbus, Ohio. Created by Hammonds + West, a team made up of artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West. This exhibit featured video, light, found objects, and sound. The sound component includes the voice of Sasha West reading her poems "Ode to Fossil Fuel" and "My House Was Beside the River." In their collaborative work Hammonds + West combine sound with sculptural installation, video with drawings, and words with images, both artists offer their personal vantage points on the precipice of a forbidding future. Their work opens liminal spaces where hard boundaries dissolve: past disasters forecast future ones, the crackle of fire becomes the cracking of wreckage in water, what is civilization becomes wilderness.“
Hollis Hammonds is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from economic disparity and state violence to environmental degradation and human-made disasters. Her dystopian drawings and found-object installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US, including solo exhibitions at venues such as Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, and the Reed Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. She has been an artist in residence at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, University of Wisconsin-Marathon, Indie Grits Film Festival, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Hammonds is the author of Drawing Structure: Conceptual and Observational Techniques and has had her creative work featured in New American Paintings, Manifest’s International Drawing Annual, FOA, Uppercase, and Art on Paper. She is a Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. www.hollishammonds.com
Featured images (top to bottom): ©Hollis Hammonds, Drawn In / Drawn Out, 2014, drawing, charcoal, Mylar, rubble, vinyl, furniture; Wasteland / Wonderland, 2016, solo exhibition at the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas, drawing, found objects, projections; Homecoming, 2019, found objects, drawing, at the Fine Arts Galleries, School of the Arts at Northern Kentucky University, as part of the 2019 National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) conference; Awake in the Dark, 2021, exhibited at Austin Public Library Gallery; The River Entered My Home, 2022, ink on Yupo paper, exhibited at CCAD (Columbus College of Art and Design), Ohio; Portrait of artist by Roberta Cornew.
