Harmony Hammond's 1990s Works at Alexander Gray Associates Confront Violence and Queer Narratives

Harmony Hammond's exhibition 'Inappropriate Longings' at Alexander Gray Associates in New York from April 19 to May 26, 2018, featured rarely seen works from the 1990s. The centerpiece installation, created in 1992, includes three large paintings and a water trough with brittle leaves, with the phrase 'GODDAMN DYKE' etched in red pigment on one panel, referencing a brutal murder. Hammond produced this piece the same year Pat Buchanan delivered a culture-war speech at the Republican National Convention, opposing radical feminism and homosexual rights. Materials like linoleum, sourced from abandoned farmhouses along her drives between Galisteo, New Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona, are incorporated into collages and paintings, fracturing narratives of rural America by highlighting violence and inserting queer evidence. Straw appears in works such as Untitled #1 (1998), where stacked hay slabs with red paint evoke bodily harm. Another mixed-media piece, Untitled (Form of Desire) (1992), combines linoleum strips, latex rubber drips, and Hammond's severed ponytail to embed personal and queer stories into modernist tropes. The show underscores ongoing threats of violence, linking the era of gay marriage to events like the Pulse nightclub massacre, and serves as a call to reimagine 'God's Country' through reclaimed materials.