CLEVELAND, OH.-The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland presents Jim Hodges on view through May 1, 2005. Jim Hodges: With a focus on handmade and labor-intensive processes, Jim Hodges transforms ordinary materials into poignant, lyrical works that transcend the everyday. Glass, fabric, mirrors, colored pencils, paint, paper and light bulbs are among the materials Hodges has used in this exhibition installed in MOCA’s main galleries. The exhibition, titled simply “Jim Hodges,” features 20 works from the past 10 years in which light figures prominently both as a primary material that the artist uses physically and conceptually as a symbol. Light permeates Hodges’ mirror “paintings,” Prismacolor drawings and delicate “spider web” chain sculptures, resonating throughout as a metaphor of time, ephemerality and illusion. The exhibition also includes Hodges’ most recently completed work: Untitled, 2004, a magnificent large scale “cut photograph” of a tree that has been meticulously altered by incising the surface so that what appears to be leaves falling away from the surface remain attached. The effect is mesmerizing, embellishing a flat surface into what appears to be a flurry of snowflakes or a swarm of butterflies.

Senior curator and coordinator of the exhibition, Margo A. Crutchfield has said, “Hodges’ deeply personal, yet universal works are imbued with beauty, memory and longing. They are works of art in which the evanescent and the enduring coalesce.”

Additionally, the exhibition has been expanded to include a large Prismacolor site-specific wall drawing created by Hodges during a two-week residency with the assistance of artists and art students from area institutions such as the Cleveland Institute of Art, Kent State University and the Myers School of Art at The University of Akron.

Commenting in Frieze in 2000, Charles LaBelle said: “Something of an alchemist, Hodges often conjures beauty from the most mundane of materials.” Indeed, his spider web sculptures woven from delicate silver chain necklaces or curtains of silk flowers that have been pulled apart and then reassembled are gorgeous testaments to the transformative aesthetic that Hodges brings to his art. At times spare and minimalist in form while verging on the abstract, Hodges’ work is rich in associative meaning. Folding (into a greater world), 1998, a large mirrored mosaic composed of a myriad of cut and fractured glass shards, becomes a meditation on temporality, loss and transcendence. On We Go, 1996, a spider web sculpture meticulously woven from fine silver jewelry chains, explores the intricacy of relationships and suggests both fragility and strength, interdependence and entrapment, beauty and danger. Animated with color and light, the light bulb sculptures Ahhha, 2000 and Ultimate Joy, 2001, become celebrations of life and human relationships.

Jim Hodges is organized by the Weatherspoon Art Museum at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. MOCA Cleveland’s presentation of this exhibition, including the addition of the site-specific Prismacolor wall drawing, was coordinated by Senior Curator Margo A. Crutchfield and is generously sponsored by Toby Devan Lewis.

Hailed by The Village Voice as one of the top choices in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Jim Hodges is rapidly gaining recognition as a leading artist in the United States today. Since the early 1990s, his work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Miami Art Museum in 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997, the Venice Biennale in 1997 and the São Paulo Bienal in 1996. Later this year, a major one-person exhibition of Hodges’ work will take place at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostello, Spain.
Hodges received a BFA from Fort Wright College in Spokane, WA in 1980 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 1986. He lives and works in New York.