Jim Hodges and the Holy Infinite

In Heaven, the clock stops ticking. A key guarantee of many religious doctrines is that a life lived according to the rules will be rewarded with everlasting life. Rather than the lights flicking off, believers will receive unending access to existence in a dream state hidden in the sky. This life in the perpetual moment—frozen in the present—halts the corporeal form’s aging, preserves it in a holy golden glow, and allows all the joy one does not have the time for, or access to, on Earth.

The work of Jim Hodges rewards similarly, allowing time to reflect and to find joy in brief moments. He finds moments of divine pause where the otherwise fleeting moments of everyday life are preserved, allowing exploration of beauty in the ethereal. This spiritual line runs through much of his work, haloing his reverence for the poetic stillness of nature, and at times, the unexplainable life beyond the self.

Hodges, raised Roman Catholic, attended religious schools for most of his life. As a child he attended a parochial school in Spokane, Washington where the children were taught art through the lens of religion, as a practice connected to faith. He went on to earn his BFA in painting from Fort Wright College, a school nestled in the woods of Spokane and run by Holy Name nuns— some in overalls and welding helmets, riding bicycles across campus.¹

Three years later Hodges moved to New York City to attend the Pratt MFA program: a very different kind of program in a very different kind of city. He dove into city life and found himself surrounded by new influences, from the myriad galleries to graffiti and the bustling hustle of the city itself. A grittiness grew in Hodges’s work with a sense of conflict that mirrored the clashing of life on the streets of New York in the early 1980s. He began to pursue a denial of the hand or of gesture in his work, inserting found objects and allowing chance operations to manipulate his paintings.

A significant transformation in his practice came with the creation of his first broken mirror piece in 1996, which he saw as a breaking from his own past.² These early mirror works were created with minimal aesthetic involvement by Hodges. Mirrors were glued to canvases, laid mirror side down and smashed blindly from behind with a hammer, allowing chance to dictate the lines spidering across the plane.

One of his mirror pieces, On earth (1998), was created just two years after his first experiment with the material, but in that time his method had evolved. Less has been left to chance, and instead the individual pieces have been shaped and assembled onto the canvas like a mosaic. Each fragment of mirrored glass has been sanded irregularly along its edges, involving more of the artist’s hand than earlier works but still forgoing any attempt at a perfect grid—instead presenting something more aligned with nature in its imperfections and irregularities. The little pieces throw light in all directions, breaking the viewer down into individualized segments and disrupting the expected reflection.

The title, On earth, echoes the second stanza of the Lord’s Prayer: “On earth as it is in Heaven” (Matthew 6:10). The piece twinkles and reflects in all directions, creating a fractal and dematerialized image of the body and the surrounding space. It allows the viewer to see small pieces of themselves, isolated and highlighted in the shimmer of the mirror, away from the whole we are so used to seeing. The work presents a reflection that is otherworldly. It appears close to our reality but there is something ungraspable in the disorienting shimmer, a suggestion of the divine beyond brought down to Earth.

This bodily, imperfect symmetry of the infinite continues in later works like Happy I (2001). What at first appears to be a perfect mirroring of colorful parallel lines pinched in the center, upon closer inspection, is revealed to be far from exact. The lines are sometimes broken and uneven, and the colors are not accurately mirrored across the center. These two halves are unique, roughly similar but individual, and yet they are able to come together in a perfect point. There is a hopeful sense of circulation here, the lines move toward the center and eventually converge, only to emerge from the other side, altered by the experience but grown again. As the lines end, they begin again growing into a possible infinity.

Another vital work from this series is titled Happy/Sunrise-Sunset (“In the Beginning is My End” — T.S. Eliot) (2001). The drawing is in some ways a reversal of Happy I; rather than the two arrays converging in a point, two points are set at opposite ends of the page and their fans extend across the center, overlapping in an almond shape at the center. The lines have many paths that can come to interact, or miss each other entirely, just like so many lives connecting or passing each other by.

The quotation by Eliot, a self-described “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion,”³ is the opening line from “East Coker,” the second poem of Eliot’s Four Quartets (1941), a meditation on time and his last major work of poetry. The title also echoes another bit of Christian text, the opening line of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1); the beginning of everything.

The Eliot poem and Hodges’s works are not concerned with only the beginning—only the first point of a sunrise—but also in the rays that grow from it and inevitably shrink away in the sunset that marks the end of the day. To move forward is to move toward the end, but only an ending can provide a beginning. Eliot’s poem goes on to circle around the endless cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction, and the unresolved conflict between the earthly, the human, and the beyond. Eliot ends the poem with a reversal, pointing to a new day: “In my end is my beginning.”

The poem was first published in 1940, a year after the outbreak of World War II, when life in Britain was precarious and the future was uncertain. “East Coker” was a success partly because it offered a sense of hope in the face of fear, a promise that there is no final curtain call.

Another existential threat of significant magnitude was similarly felt by those in New York in the 1980s, as each day the AIDS epidemic reached new heights with no solution in sight. “Our generation, we were thrown into this war, this chaos, this horrible reality that felt like we were being attacked, and there was nowhere to hide and you didn’t know if it was going to hit you,”⁴Hodges recalls. “Your best friend all of a sudden sick and then it was like, now what the fuck? Now what’s going to happen?”⁵ Hodges made it out, though not without losing many around him. Living through a time of profound, confusing loss can certainly make one hope for a pause, some kind of stillness to catch one’s breath.

In a later work, Arena II (given a shaft of sunlight) (2007), Hodges’s depiction of a cloud and light—otherwise anti-sculptural works—are given depth and body through an accumulation of semi-transparent sheets, each printed with only fragments of the cloud. As with the fragmented mirror works, there is no simple grid to which the sheets are aligned; there is a natural, almost accidental process at work in the layering. Pieces of tape affixing the sheets to each other and to the board serve as further layers, transparent but visible, another small piece to pass through. Like vapor clustering into what appears to be a solid mass, these layers of barely-there prints on barely-there paper give rise to something larger. The layering of the sheets gives lightness to much of the ink layers and creates the illusion of crepuscular rays shining down through the cloud, a familiar suggestion of the divine in the sky.

Perhaps again the subtitle here is an uncredited nod to Eliot, who speaks of a “sudden shaft of sunlight” in “Burnt Norton,” another poem from Four Quartets which again explores the nature of time, focusing on what it means to live in the present and claiming love as a kind of stillness.⁶ For Eliot, the shaft of sunlight is a suggestion of the divine, an unmoving force which the world circles around and he sees in a moment of happiness.

Jim Hodges has constantly found ways for his works to reveal sudden shafts of sunlight, illuminating the materials of everyday life, and allowing the time for viewers to reflect in its stillness. He has contained fragments of the natural world and suggested the infinite not as a particular gesture but as something from beyond given the space to shine through.

1. Carr, Cynthia, and Jim Hodges. “Oral History Interview with Jim Hodges, 2017 March 9-May 25.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jim-hodges-17480#transcript.
2. Hodges, Jim, Ian Berry, Ron Platt, and Allan Schwartzman. Jim Hodges. Saratoga Springs (N.Y.): Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2003. 56.
3. Eliot, Thomas Stearns For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. IX.
4. Carr, Cynthia, and Jim Hodges. “Oral History Interview with Jim Hodges, 2017 March 9-May 25.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jim-hodges-17480#transcript.
5. Carr, Cynthia, and Jim Hodges. “Oral History Interview with Jim Hodges, 2017 March 9-May 25.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jim-hodges-17480#transcript.
6. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 122.