4/19/2023 0 Comments Namely austin![]() ![]() Recurring themes include a desire for equality for oppressed and minority communities, a meditation on the inevitable passage of time and waning of the corporeal body, and a quiet optimism, projected through universal elements that tap into the individual emotions and experiences of each viewer.Īlongside these themes, Hodges’s work has expanded in recent years beyond fragility and ephemerality to explore situations of permanence and timelessness. Formal aestheticism, marked by an affinity toward beauty, is an important element to Hodges’s practice but exists as only the first of many layers, the initial “web”-and the artist quite literally portrays the spiderweb as a frequent protagonist in his visual lexicon-that entangles the viewer into deeper conceptual, social, and emotional underpinnings. However, like the work of his friend, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hodges’s response was not heavy-handed politicism but disarmingly simple, sometimes beautiful, and seemingly innocuous objects and installations that often engaged the viewer in an immersive or even playful manner while serving as Trojan horses for powerful political messages. ![]() As a gay artist, Hodges was deeply enmeshed in the culture wars and AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, and his beginnings can also be contextualized within a deeply fraught period in which many artists, facing censorship, were activists and political outliers. Following a previous generation of artists working in found and “poor” materials and advocating for a dematerialized form of art making, namely 1960s and 1970s precursors such as Eva Hesse, Marisa and Mario Merz, Paul Thek, and Richard Tuttle, as well as 1970s minimalist and conceptualist artists including Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sol LeWitt, Hodges’s practice embraced ephemerality and the handmade in both concept and material. Quotidian materials-including glass, steel, crystal, plastic, tape, paper, rubber, foil, mirrors, metals, fake flowers, scarves, used clothing, ink, paint, makeup, and even saliva-become the basis for his simple but profound gestures, manifested as sculptures, installations, works on paper, videos, and performances. ![]() The impermanence and fragility of the human experience, inspired by the overlooked corners of everyday life, run central to the work of Jim Hodges (American, born 1957 in Spokane, Washington). On View at The Moody Rooftop at the Jones Center ![]()
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