MADISON, WI.- The Chazen Museum of Art presents Jane Hammond: Paper Work, on view through Auguts 12, 2007. Zany, mysterious, and quotidian, the forty-nine works on paper convey both thoughts and the slippery process of thinking itself. Hammond uses various techniques and materials as well as ideas and feelings to create collages of mental associations and visual stimuli. Her works make reference to board games, scrapbooks, maps, charts, books, and even three-dimensional costumes. This exhibition includes drawings in a variety of media, unique paper objects, prints, and limited edition artist’s books.

Hammond, who received her MFA from the University of Madison-Wisconsin in 1977, is a renowned artist whose works reflect her lifelong fascination with collecting, sorting, and memory. Along the way, she invented her own visual language, based on 276 images borrowed from books on everything from puppetry to beekeeping. She has described her intricate collage style as a “semiotic genome project,” underscoring the endlessly varied interactions between image and viewer. “My intention was to use the lexicon of the 276 images in ‘recombinant’ fashion-think DNA-and let myself make any kind of work of art I wanted with them,” Hammond has written.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, All Souls (Masindi), is the latest in Hammond’s exquisitely lifelike butterfly map series. Another exhibition highlight is Scrapbook (1000 Yen), a large open book with sewn-in Japanese paper. Affixed to the two open pages are silhouettes, paper doll-like figures, paper flowers, money, safety pins, paper necklaces, and handmade paper matchbooks.

Jane Hammond graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1977. She moved to New York City in 1980 and had her first solo exhibition in 1987. She has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally ever since. Hammond’s art has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Art on Paper, BOMB, and Art News, among many other publications. Among her professional accomplishments are a number of distinguished awards, including grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Works of art by Hammond have been acquired by more than 70 museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Jane Hammond: Paper Work is organized and toured by Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. A full-color illustrated catalogue, with essays by Fay Hirsch and Nancy Princenthal as well as an interview with Hammond by Douglas Dreishpoon, curator of twentieth-century art at the Albright-Knox Art Museum, will be available in the Museum Shop.

Generous funding for this exhibition has been provided by Chazen Museum of Art Council, Hilldale Fund, and Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin.