Review

'Maia One," Ink and Watercolor on Synthetic Paper.

Lynne Hodgman
Amalgam

8 a.m.-5 p.m.

R.G. Endres Gallery
Prairie Village Municipal Offices
7700 Mission Road
Prairie Village, KS
913.381.6464

Hours: 8 a.m.-5 p.m, Monday-Friday.
Runs through: March 31.

Artist's site: http://www.lynnehodgman.com
Gallery site: http://www.pvkansas.com/aboutpv/art/index.shtml

When ARTKC365 took its first halting steps, on New Year's Day 2009, it was to feature Lynne Hodgman's show Lynneguistics at Pi Gallery.

A few things have happened since then, including the closing of Pi earlier this month and Review's adoption late last year of this daily exercise in bridge-building. Hodgman's art has evolved as well: Amalgam, her current show at the R.G. Endres Gallery in the Prairie Village Municipal Offices, is brighter and more geometric than Lynneguistics.

What hasn't changed is Hodgman's fascination with the pen, pencil and brush strokes we use to convey everything from information to instruction to inspiration — as she puts it, the power and mystery of the abstraction that is written language.

The characters at the heart of her art, however, aren't in English ... or Greek, or Sanskrit, or On Beyond Zebra! They most closely resemble Asian writing, but they're entirely her own.

I create language-like symbols I call Glyphs, which are wholly invented and one-of-a-kind, Hodgman writes. There is no alphabet and there is no translation. I have made tens of thousands of Glyphs in many mediums. Much of my work is repetitive, rhythmic, and obsessive in its development of multiples and series.

The geometric patterns found in such works as Maia One, pictured above, are a reflection of a different sort of language — one encoded in numbers as well as in words.

Art, like mathematics, is a symbolic language, Hodgman explains. It employs metaphor on many levels, creating images and objects that reference ideas or entities either imagined or existing in “the real world.” A Glyph is also metaphor, a symbol of a symbol. Glyphs are an expression of the human impulse to make a mark, to leave an impression, to influence, to contribute, to communicate, to accomplish.

What of their interpretation, though? That's not for Hodgman to say.

My work thus tells stories of its own composition, she writes. It comes to me unbidden; you give it meaning with your looking.

But while each viewer carries his or her own Rosetta Stone, and that unlike anyone else's, there is a universal message being painted and drawn here ... one that hasn't changed over thousands of years.

Hodgman's Glyphs encapsulate the wordless cry/whisper/hum of the creative spirit, and the silent hope that others will see, and take in, and respond.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Updating...