Jim Hodges: It only takes a minute

24 Jan-1 Mar 2025

PV 23 Jan 2025, 6-8pm

Overview

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present 'It only takes a minute', a new UK solo exhibition by Jim Hodges. 

Through materials, images, forms and gestures, reflecting on intimacy, history, values and casuality, Hodges invites an inquiry into our relationship to time, its measures, and meanings. 

Extending through the gallery, composed of found materials, carved marble and oil painting, in varied ranges of scale and tonality, this new work resonates with whimsy, humility, foreboding and mystery to highlight themes of beauty, fragility and impermanence.

Rendered in painted bronze and white marble, the familiar, modest gathering of intimate belongings to be discovered in 'Craig’s closet' have been captured in time. Even as they speak of the specific world, and the specific life in which these objects – clothing, keepsakes, closed forever containers – were brought together, they seem to now transcend their temporal materiality.

Of this work, Hodges writes: “For those of us with the good fortune to have a place to hang our things, a closet is a magical container, a collection of materials, arranged by each of us, that can, at a glance, reveal our cares, desires and even our deepest secrets. Within a closet time is frozen, and in what is kept there fragmented into contrasting visual and conceptual rhythms, meters and durations. Things accumulated and arranged, carefully stacked and aligned are juxtaposed with the quickly thrown down or casually abandoned to be taken care of later or simply forgotten. Out of this dense setting narratives blossom and come alive – looking in we’re reminded of who we are, where we’ve been, the hopes, treasures and dreams we hold. It’s there in boxes concealing our heart’s contours, scribbled messages on folded notes and cards, photos, records, files – all the stuff we’ve saved for reasons each item embodies, and all the choices made are there as well in this often hidden holding space, the closet.”

Shifting from playful contrasting weights and tempos, from light reflections in polished marble to the twinkling wings of a butterfly night light, the exhibition moves next to a darker terrain where we are met with shadows and suggestions of memories and times long past. It only takes a minute draws the viewer along a path that concludes in the dimming light of the last gallery where we come upon a silk-veiled vision of a mysterious looming garage space. This murky, sensual apparition, rescued from the Louisiana bayou, is a musky and erotic threshold for the senses and our imaginations to cross. There we encounter an archive of materials in a spectrum of patinas that build to create a double portrait of a father and his son.

Throughout his evolving mixed-media practice, Hodges invites his audience to join him in the co-creation of living art – of experiences that resist mechanical reproduction and defy simple categorisation. Over decades Hodges’ work with common and familiar forms has mined psychological, emotional, spiritual and social terrains that spark potent connections. 

For Hodges “...joy and inquiry are entwined in the connections and relationships that art can bring into being, transcending cultures, differences, divisions, binaries, and barriers. Valuing the common and every day we meet, to co-create the art where our shared humanity may be felt, and in feeling we can find affirmation and reminders of the delicacy, fragility and preciousness that is our human materiality. And in this materiality of site specificity, each of us shines with one another across the field of art’s infinity.”

Artists