Search Light

“Search Light,” an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and drawings by Jane Hammond, is at Galerie Lelong through April 22. The show features what Hammond calls “Dazzle paintings,” works derived from photos, painted in acrylic on a surface of mica sheets over Plexiglas. Hammond infuses these paintings with silver, gold, copper, and palladium leaf, giving them a dense, textured reflectivity. Her photographs, meanwhile, are digitally manipulated to present what she calls “stills from a movie in my head.” In a 2013 interview, she explained,

I’ve always worked with found information … When I talk to myself about my paintings, I always use this word jammed. It’s a reference to how each constituent element in the painting is coming from a disparate source, from another culture, from another time. Each one is freighted with the way they drew in England in the 1890s, or an Art Deco sensibility, or the way woodcuts looked in Germany in 1500, or Chinese ink drawings. And I’ve always valued these inconsistencies. You know, there is a rabbit on a branch; the branch is much more detailed than the rabbit is; the branch is seen from the left; the rabbit is seen from the right. That’s what I call jamming. I like the collision of the otherness.