Jane Hammond -
My Heavens!
American, b.1950
My Heavens!, 2004
Lithograph with collage, 30 x 51 inches
Edition 39/40
Shark's Ink
04.004
Gift of Kathleen J. Crispell (LSA '67) and Thomas S. Porter (MBA '67)
Since 1988 Jane Hammond has worked with a collection of 276 images compiled from a wide variety of sources, including manuals, children's books, books on magic and puppetry, medical journals, technical illustrations, matchbook covers, labels, charts and maps. She recombines the elements of this lexicon to create new images in the form of paintings, drawings, and prints.
Hammond's work is in many public collections including: The Art Institute of Chicago; La Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum and many others.
Jane Hammond's new color lithograph/ collage entitled My Heavens! is an imaginary portrayal of the night sky bifurcated into northern and southern hemispheres and densely packed with colorful renderings of fictitious constellations among them a ballerina, a lobster, and a dolphin. Divined from apparent patterns in the sky, the idiosyncratic figures, which appear as though they had been excised from a story, are of the artist's own making, her effort perhaps, to give form to the unfathomable.
