Collage Materials: Jim Hodges

Jim Hodges, “Every Touch,” (detail) 1995

Jim Hodges does a lot with flowers.  Also mirrors, granite, scarves, and, oh yeah, paper.  The results are magical and exhilarating. Also fragile and sorrowful. In many of his works, a collage aesthetic is at play.

Jim Hodges, Untitled, 2000. Acrylic on newspaper, 56 x 68.6 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Artlicks via Another Mag.

Paper was the first material that fascinated him. He talked about it during his 2009 exhibition Love, Etc. at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in an interview with Christophe Ecoffet.  Hodges liked “the flexibility of paper, how paper can tear, and be unfolded and folded.”  In one work, he collaged hearts cut from painted newspaper.

Tartan, Pablo Neruda, Comme des Garcons

Still from Nick Relph’s “Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field” 2010

I like putting things together that you wouldn’t normally connect. Once I Googled on “Pablo Neruda” and “Allen Iverson.”  Who else might connect the late Chilean poet and the hip-hop NBA star?   I got some weird links, but clicked on one which turned out to be a blog partly in English and mostly in another language. Which  I  couldn’t even identify. The only thing that came to my mind was: Tagalog? I wasn’t even sure what that was.

Turned out to be right! Tagalog is a primary language of the Phillipines, and I verified from towns mentioned in a blog post about shopping that the blogger was a twenty-something woman in the Phillipines who shared my fondness for both these guys with poetic crossover moves and a tendency to stir controversy.
A British artist living in New York, Nick Relph likes to come up with surprising combinations.