Jane Hammond

In her paintings and photographic prints, Jane Hammond organizes found image fragments into surreal juxtapositions, foraging flea markets, used bookstores, and antique shops for inspiration. Hammond’s densely literary paintings, which she intends to make “as complicated, inconsistent, varied, multifaceted as you are, as I am, as life is,” as she has said, include images of props such as masks of Einstein and King Tut, and puppet parts. During Hammond’s nine-year collaboration with the poet John Ashbery, he suggested titles for her paintings, including “A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets,” “Do Husbands Matter?” and “The Wonderfulness of Downtown,” which served as the starting point for her compositions. Hammond also produces black-and-white photomontages that draw on elements of Russian Constructivism and Dada, which she reworks digitally, collaging, retouching, and developing shadow and tone before converting the digital file into a negative and printing the resulting image in the darkroom as a gelatin silver photograph.