Hohimer
Negotiated Desires
Gerald Peters Contemporary
May 21 through July 31 2021
Elizabeth Hohimer’s site-specific, land-based practice is an immersive study of desert atmospheres in the western United States. From her childhood in Texas to her recent travels throughout the West, Hohimer has felt a closeness to the land and a deep appreciation for the space and light of the region.
In her tapestries, scale, open structure and color combine to convey the impression of luminosity. Hohimer ’s signature atmospheric compositions employ a reduced palette reminiscent of the desert landscapes that inspired the work.
Interested in conveying the transcendent, Hohimer’s compositional choices are accompanied by the conviction that those elements could reveal the presence of philosophical truths, harmony and order. These elements, more closely affiliated with painting, distinguish the work from its traditional utilitarian associations and bridge the compositions to the Modern histories of painting.
Her recent stylistic explorations have led to a proliferation of new works with layered transparencies of vibrant pigments and earth tones culminating in luminous and ethereal compositions. As in her previous series, Hohimer’s new work maintains her commitment to abstractness as a means of articulating the essence and physicality of the desert landscape. - Evan Feldman.
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Hohimer says, "The materials and colors combined in these tapestries carry through an essence from the High
Desert of West Texas once felt by me into the physical realm. Weaving acts as a translator for a
feeling into an object of notation, linking past with present through one long intimate and infinite
moment, not adhered to time. Summer in the High Desert doesn't seem to adhere to time either
and it gives you two days in one when you time it right. It leaves you longing for that first sliver
of night when the sun breaks on you for a bit so your breath can sink deeper and your eyes can
steer upward for longer. My recent tapestries made during the summer of 2020 serve as an
artifact of feelings formed from disant desert blues, late August meteor showers and summer
shade. Through the process of making energy felt translates into energy held, then viewed. The
essence of a fleeting moment is processed through each thread's touch of my fingertips as a
reverence to melancholy. I see this transfer from dot to dot as lines that form truth, clarity and
beauty. I employ colors, textures and space to reverberate emotions left from experiences of
sublime stillness.The past and present is tied as threads to the beam of my loom with the
combined nuance of using weaving, such a traditional form of making, to hold a contemporary
conversation. I use an ancient act aged in alchemy to create contemporary paintings. Weaving
as a process for making paintings in itself contains the binding of time and dances between the
mythical and the mondain. From drafting to weaving my process contains strict formal
choreography, kindred to minimal painting while maintaining abstract references to the collective
memory that the materials, colors and titles send out of the American West due to a personal
history in and love for those Deserts."
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Objects of desire, tokens of love; formed due to binding or distilling clarity into an object that
sustains and reverberates beauty felt from being in the desert's sky and/or the feeling when its
colors that lie beneath your feet move up into your body.
