Jim Hodges

Press release

The Baldwin Gallery is pleased to announce its second show with renowned American artist Jim Hodges. Hodges works with a variety of media: including paper, fabric, glass, metal and mirrors, and the resulting work is transcendently experiential. Hodges’ evocative constructed images and created spaces immerse the viewer in participatory sensations of dense forest, insects swarm in a summer day, the ageless smear of milky-way, ‘I think that I shall never see’, butterfly-pinned in effigy for the someday no longer.

In the current presentation, “tracing the contours of our days”, Hodges has composed natural-history diorama cases as though from an immanent future: Hodges draws the viewer to wander an entrancing Wunderkammer holodeck of terrestrial reliquary. A paean to, or a lament for a vanish(ing)ed world when the anthropocene hourglass has run down. As staged, extinct fragments of an exquisite now are preserved by a scientific husbandry: the wincing twinge of loss faintly scented with memory and nostalgia, but also soaring ideals and opportunity: even as angels dance the heads of atoms, Hodges entices the visitor to treasure what we all have before it’s gone.

Jim Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington in 1957 and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1986. Currently based in New York City, Hodges’ work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including: the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Camden Art Centre, London; the Aspen Art Museum; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and retrospective at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (traveled to: Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX in 2013; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2014; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2014). In addition Hodges was served as the Acting Director of the Graduate Sculpture Department at the Yale University School of Art for the 2011/2012 academic year.

Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.