Sorcha Dallas

Hammond’s work is arch and knowing but never contrived. In scenes bestowed with allusive, Campbellesque titles, Hammond’s figures defy their author and take on a life of their own. Some recent works have seen these subjects proudly displaying themselves as high art, while others hide behind bushes, masked or under layers of jesmonite. In all Hammond’s work the paradoxical territories of sophisticated naivety and ‘chance domesticated’ are traversed, alternately controlling and relinquishing a grasp on authorial hierarchies. With tongue in cheek and a steady hand, Hammond walks the line between Romantic immersion and canny sagacity in his piquant, heady confections.

Hammond was born in Aylesbury in 1979 and graduated from the painting department at Glasgow School of Art in 2002. Recent exhibitions include the solo show ‘Anachronisms less speedy, less beautiful, less efficient than the machines which have replaced them’ at Glasgow Project Rooms, 2005 and the group show ‘Keep Passing the Open Windows or Happiness’ at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, 2006. Hammond has been selected to appear in ‘Expanded Painting 2’ at The 3rd Prague Biennale in May 2007 and will also exhibit alongside Alex Pollard at The Armory Show, New York in February 2007 (with Sorcha Dallas).

Gallery Commissioned Text:

Notes on the Idea: Nick Evans, 2006

1) Between 1961 – 1967 Asger Jorn, Danish artist and co-founder of the Situationist International, dedicated himself to a revision of modern philosophy from the standpoint of the artist. Driving Jorn’s scheme was his wish to acknowledge the truth of objective subjectivity, the actual existence of the experiencing and acknowledging subject in the present. The duality of the materialistic and idealistic world-view is made triadic by the addition of a third methodology, that of intuitive ideas.

2) Marx’s historical logic was repelled by the existence of Bohemia. These motley members of the lumpen proletariat were neither bourgeois nor proletarian. Instead they had dropped out of the system of representation upon which class identification depended. Representing nothing, they were a scandal for the logic of history.

3) Henri Michaux, artist and writer, studied the effects of mescaline in a series of feverish drawings made in the 1950s whilst under the influence of the drug. In probing the furthermost reaches of the mind and documenting the collapse of consensus reality into pure perception Michaux’s motives, unlike other mescaline pioneers, were not utopian. Instead his investigations foreground the relationship of the mind to the body. Though exists in the mind as raw matter only to be disfigured by language.

4) Battaille was fascinated by the lumpen proletariat for much of the same reasons as Marx was repelled by them; namely their ability to void the economy of representation. Bataille’s notion of the Informe is grounded on the wreckage of representation, of assimilating everything to form. The scatological, the lumpen and the base transgress from below and cannot be assimilated into rule-regulated society. Rule-regulated society nonetheless produces waste, waste it cannot assimilate, and which therefore exists within its systems of representation as a threat.