October 27 – November 28, 2014
RECEPTION: Friday, November 14, 6:00pm – 8:00pm

LECTURE: Thursday, November 13, 7:00pm – 8:00pm, in VA 111

VISUAL ARTS GALLERY
UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING
1000 E. University Ave.
Laramie, WY 82070

Patrick Earl Hammie: Premortem is a collection of new drawings that focus on closely cropped portraits to explore themes related to agency, maternity, and mortality. Considering the potential representations of the human figure have to reflect the values of the period in which they are produced, Hammie’s work investigates the expectations built into this canonical genre, probing and dismantling the idealizing impulses that have historically shaped it. Drawing on the emotive qualities of Romanticist painting and its use of heroic proportions to engage with political and humanistic expression, he focuses specifically on constructions of gender and race, putting pressure on these categories as a means of expanding understandings of identity, and reconfiguring inherited conceptions of ideal beauty and heroic nudity.