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Lot Essay
Landscape, Jim Hodges's many-tiered shirt sculpture from 1998, is a self-portrait depicting the artist's development from boy to man. The piece is composed of many of Hodges's shirts, all pulled from different years of his life, one stuffed inside the next and then flattened across a table, exposing only the multicolored collars, a subtle nod to what may lie beneath the solid white, conservative upper layer. The piece is an extension of the quiet reflections that compose Hodges's oeuvre and of his utilization of everyday materials to tell profound stories of direct, if multi-layered personal experiences.
Hodges has always said that he projects himself into his work, aiming for a tactile immediacy in his manipulation and "unforming of materials to see what's there. It's about discovery" (J. Hodges as quoted in, I. B. and R. Platt, Jim Hodges, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, exh. cat., 2003, p. 15). With the sensibility of a painter, Hodges draws out the inherent beauty of manufactured materials, using them as metaphors for the complex nature of human existence. Hodges's excavation of the charged meanings that inhere in the button-down shirts of his past can be understood as a coming of age sartorial ritual-from the shorts and t-shirts of boyhood to the grown-up attire of men-that parallels his own sexual and psychological development.
Hodges was raised in Spokane, Washington amidst the wild, breathtaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest. His early love of the natural beauty proffered by the earth informs much of his work such that Landscape can be read as an autobiographical story on multiple levels, a reinterpretation of the foundation of his aesthetic development told in tandem with the ubiquitous objects of the everyday.
Hodges has always said that he projects himself into his work, aiming for a tactile immediacy in his manipulation and "unforming of materials to see what's there. It's about discovery" (J. Hodges as quoted in, I. B. and R. Platt, Jim Hodges, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, exh. cat., 2003, p. 15). With the sensibility of a painter, Hodges draws out the inherent beauty of manufactured materials, using them as metaphors for the complex nature of human existence. Hodges's excavation of the charged meanings that inhere in the button-down shirts of his past can be understood as a coming of age sartorial ritual-from the shorts and t-shirts of boyhood to the grown-up attire of men-that parallels his own sexual and psychological development.
Hodges was raised in Spokane, Washington amidst the wild, breathtaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest. His early love of the natural beauty proffered by the earth informs much of his work such that Landscape can be read as an autobiographical story on multiple levels, a reinterpretation of the foundation of his aesthetic development told in tandem with the ubiquitous objects of the everyday.