Significant Other
July 26 –
August 31, 2013
207 East Buffalo Street, Suite 222
Milwaukee, WI
Significant
Other,
the conceptual sequel to Patrick Earl Hammie’s 2008 project Imperfect Colossi, seeks to visualize an effort to reposition
institutional power paradigms and ideas of representation. Hammie works to re-present ways in which gender, race and the
nude have been historically represented. Adopting body language, narrative,
lighting, scale and gesture as metaphors, he reinvents and remixes ideal beauty
and heroic nudity.
Hammie states, “Perhaps more than any other form
of image-making, figurative painting is often read as a mirror of the time in
which it is made; the canvas might be uniquely valued as a type of
sociohistorical document. Male artists have historically
presented the
female nude as a static object and the male nude cloaked
in allegory, which aimed to provide forums for culturally sanctioned looking
for an understood heterosexual audience. In the absence of allegory, the penis became
mostly un-representable as its presence would make vulnerable to critique the
idea and signifier of male power. Subsequently, the
black male body has been subject to grotesque exaggerations ranging from abject
physical features to hypersexual endowment, all of which reinforced white male
normativity and command.
When one goes down the road of representation in paint, particularly the
figurative, and more specifically the nude, there are certain histories and
responsibilities to be navigated and acknowledged. What’s at stake here is
representation.”
With Significant Other, Hammie suggests two
figures as halves of self, using abdication and the will to act as foils to
visualize alternatives to masculine traditions, constructions of identity,
gender politics and race.
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