One of my main reasons for coming to Santa Fe this weekend was to catch Harmony Hammond's show at SITE Santa Fe - which has the large spaces to do this huge and complex work justice. I'd seen a lot of this work in her studio, which was an enormous privilege, but today allowed for a different kind of viewing and thinking - albeit underpinned by having discussed some of these pieces with her. Or rather, I could think in my own time, without having to share my associative thoughts - and this is work that invites association, whether of bodies, wounds, barn doors, bandages, bleeding nipples, grommets, string, paint, more paint.
I'm always fascinated by the undercurrent of religious symbolism in her work, even as it references New Mexican iconography as much as anything - which isn't to say that I know what to make of it.
She's long used household linens and scraps. There was some new work using materials salvaged from abandoned houses and/or yard sales, and so on: one piece with lino scraps (not shown here) I didn't feel especially drawn to, but I loved Bandaged Grid #10 (La Mesa) - of which this is but a tiny portion. That's another thing about her work: its textures and layers, folds and lumps and shadows reward close looking, and are as beautiful in their extracted details as they are taken as a whole.
An added bonus was the show by a Diné artist, Dakota Mace, about sacred spaces, memory, and revering the ordinary within them (sounds rather like part of the argument of my book, but I can't, I simply can't, write another chapter, about ... raindrops? Grasses? Stars? She makes many chemigrams - using cochineal, cottonwood bark tannin, walnut dye, and other natural substances, and ties them together, or nails them onto the wall in huge grids; there are other prints with beads stitched on them in geometric shapes; they all reference Native ties with the land, and are each compellingly different.
Outside, there were some wild clouds rolling off the Sangre de Cristos, but they swerved off to Los Alamos, or somewhere else.
And then there were more ominous clouds when I went to take - maybe a year's worth of bottles and glass to the tip. But not a drop fell.
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