January 26 – March 16, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, January 26, 2013
Artist Talk: 7 pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce A Zone of Reduced Complexity, an exhibition of new work by Carl Hammoud. This is the artist's first solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery. The show includes graphite drawings, watercolors, oil paintings, and paper sculptures.
Carl Hammoud's work depicts scenes and objects from laboratories, museums, libraries, archives, offices, and classrooms. His imagery seems to be lifted from the periphery of scientific experimentation, academic research, and cultural preservation. The work alludes to fields of study ranging from psychology and chemistry to lepidoptery and seismology to conservation and restoration.
The color palette in Hammoud's work typically falls in the range of muted blues, grays, and browns. He works from photographs—found or original—that he combines, alters, and transforms into drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The resulting artworks are clean, precise, and methodically rendered, as if his work were research that was subject to approval by the most stringent of ethical review boards.
Hammoud is interested in the construction of systems that enable the proliferation of knowledge, meaning, and understanding. He is fascinated by how humans are fascinated by the world around them. It seems everything in the world must have a name, a reason, an explanation. Order is the Holy Grail of the Information Age.
Containers are a recurring motif in Hammoud's work—drawers, jars, boxes, or interior, architectural spaces—that function as a metaphor for categorization, organization, and simplification. Containers imply curation: inclusion and exclusion, pointing to significant artifacts and ignoring extraneous information. They are bastions against chaos and randomness, tools for systematic compilation, reflection, analysis, and discovery.
Although Hammoud's investigations are rigorous and thorough, they are deeply suffused with mystery. Books open to reveal blank pages; card catalogue drawers contain no cards; glass jars filled with clear liquid (or perhaps nothing at all) carry white, empty labels. The only thing these vessels hold is potential. Abandoned before use, stripped of hard-earned data, or perhaps impotent, inadequate for their prescribed tasks, Hammoud's vehicles for the acquisition and advancement of knowledge remain inexplicably stationary. Hammoud's pursuit of order—alongside mankind's—renders meaning and meaninglessness indivisible.
Swedish artist Carl Hammoud was born in 1976 and lives and works in Stockholm. He has exhibited extensively in Scandinavia. Hammoud has had solo shows at the Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and the Kalmar Art Museum (Sweden). He has participated in group shows at institutions including Magasin 3 (Stockholm), the Turku Art Museum (Finland), and the Borås Museum of Modern Art (Sweden). His work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Magasin 3, the Malmö Art Museum, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Museum Frieder Burda (Baden-Baden, Germany), and the British Museum (London).