Jan Hammer

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Jan Hammer in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street.  There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, January 17, from 6 to 8 pm.

In his debut exhibition, Hammer will present three works.  The Boy Scout Project/The Frozen Sun comprises a series of panels featuring dozens of images and found objects that document the artist’s search for the original owner of a Boy Scout jacket he bought as a teenager.  This three-year investigation was inspired in part by the opening scene in Chris Marker's film La Jetée.  Mounted like evidence in plastic bags on the panels, the photographs, along with objects scattered on the floor below, trace Hammer's obsessive investigation into the origins of the American jacket purchased in his youth from a second hand store in his native Germany.  When the artist moved to New York, the "1968 Retreat" patch on the jacket’s sleeve was the starting point for his sentimental journey into an American culture he knew only through television and film. 

Atlantic is a DVD projection of 180 images with sound.  Paying homage to works as varied as the later films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, early 1930s German cinema, and the work of James Coleman, Hammer uses photographic and filmic images as raw material, evoking misconceptions of place, time, culture and narrative.  Directing two actors to create a sequence of cinematic stills, the artist explores the disconnection between a young couple.  The script, spoken by a male and a female voice, heightens the hypnotic abstraction of word and image into an audiovisual poetry.  A third work by Hammer shows a documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright playing on a television in a North Carolina hotel room. The strangely banal yet dramatic environment bridges a narrated story with a distinctly outside view of American architecture and setting.

Jan Hammer received his MFA from Hunter College in 2002.  He has been included in an exhibition curated by Cheyney Thompson at Omi Gallery in Boston, and in the Wight Biennial at UCLA in 2001.  The artist currently lives and works in New York and Berlin.