Friday April 28, 2006
Fisch Haus Studios
Work by John Hammer
John Hammer, WSU Painting graduate student, showed his recent paintings this past Final Friday. The show consisted of 7 large scale, oil paintings of all male, homosexually suggestive portraits of life. The works dealt with societal situations in the male arena. Several were of early 1950’s “Physique Pictorial” posed males. These pictorials were originally advertised as depictions of the perfect male body in magazine format and mail order postcards. But years later, the realization of the almost all gay audience proved them to be the early start of the gay erotica industry. The paintings that Hammer has produced are generally basic reproductions and color studies of these male models. But due to the other imagery included in the show, the viewer realizes that this isn’t just a male figure study, but an inside look of the homosexual male in American culture. The other paintings included in the portray imagery of the American cowboy and rodeo culture and the American male as soldier and protector in the time of war. Each painting is well executed with loose, modeled brush strokes and a limited, light color palette very representative of Hammer’s style.
Although the subjects rendered in Hammer’s work are everyday portraits of life (bull riding, soldier comradery and body building for example) together as a whole, they each allude to one another via the culture of the American male with a twist of queer culture. The bull rider has been minimized to nothing but “below the belt” rider and bull in mid ride and the soldiers placed in sexually charged close proximity to one another.
While these paintings are of everyday, masculine situations, I believe that they are an excellent insight to the ideas of our culture towards straight activities and the hidden homosexual parallels that coexist. Overall the show seems to be a successfully cohesive body of work that isn’t in your face, but cautiously standing in the shadows of life, waiting to be tread upon and discovered. Sexual gratification or just a male bonding experience is an excellent question that is presented therein.
