Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce Ceremony, an exhibition of new work by Jim Hodges. Known for a cross-disciplinary practice that includes painting, sculpture, drawing and collaborative performance, Hodges’ distinctive visual language explores how shared spaces and familiar objects accumulate and radiate universal meaning. Simultaneously expressive of nature and the body, the political and the personal, Hodges’ work ponders the transcendent quality of those moments when the ephemeral coincides with the infinite. Drawing inspiration from the multitude of experiences accommodated by the concept of the ceremony, this exhibition examines how memory, time, and trace are inscribed upon the communal spaces we pass through.

Central to Ceremony is Drawn to place, a new installation comprised of twelve basalt columns sourced from a single geological structure. Formed from volcanic lava and presented here as an intact familial unit, each column features a strategic intervention: a highly polished, mirror-like surface that furthers the artist’s investigation of reflectivity as its own medium. Oriented in the gallery to reference the footprint of a portal-like enclosure, the sculpture will play host to a number of performances over the course of the exhibition, expanding upon Hodges’ career-long interest in the alchemical interplay between collaboration, materiality, and experience. Evocative of the sylvan, the cultural, and the spiritual, Drawn to place literalizes the often-negligible distance between monuments made by human beings and those conceived by nature.

Hodges will also present two new monumental sculptures from his Boulder series. Comprised respectively of white quartz and lichen rock, these objects both retain and are liberated from their nature; while their contours present as expected, their surfaces have been transformed by seamlessly inlayed skins of highly reflective stainless-steel. The resulting artworks function as both ancient historical records and as contemporary reflections of the now, their presence simultaneously invoking permanence and temporal flux. Here, the past, present and future trespass on one another in a poetic meditation that incorporates our contemporary world with the fabric of history.

Functioning as a counterweight to these large-scale sculptures, the artist will present a rotating series of drawings, paintings and objects that appear throughout the duration of the exhibition. Unfolding within the space alongside a program of planned performances, Hodges proposes the gallery as a site of perpetual becoming, a static space that is repeatedly transformed by the interventions and interactions that occur within its walls. Inviting visitors to encounter art and the exhibition space itself as a landscape of possibility, Hodges captures the radically transformative power of ritual, human interaction, and community.