Jim Hodges (artist)

American artist
the governor of South Carolina

Jim Hodges (born October 16, 1957) is a New York based installation artist. He is known for his mixed media sculptures and collages that involve delicate artificial flowers, mirrors, chains as spiderwebs, and cut up jeans.

Jim Hodges was born in Spokane, Washington and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Fort Wright College in 1980. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 1986. That year he met art collector Elaine Dannheisser who let him use a studio in the basement of her foundation on Duane Street in exchange for working as a part time art handler. During this time he abandoned his original medium of painting and started exploring materiality; this became his first major artistic crisis because he had realized that his concepts weren't connecting with his paintings. His works frequently employed different materials and techniques, from ready made objects to more traditional media, such as metal chains, artificial flowers, gold leaf, and mirrored elements. Hodges' conceptual practice, which addressed overlooked and obvious touchstones of life, reflected human experience and mortality. As seen in "With the Wind" (1997) and "You" (1997), he consistently incorporated embroidery to magnify notions of domesticity, a mother's presence, and early notions of femininity. Originally influenced by the woods of his hometown of Spokane, nature plays a reoccurring role throughout his works. In the years following his graduation from Pratt Institute, Hodges struggled to develop a theme within his works that would express his role as an artist. His use of color disappeared during this period, when he abandoned painting and gradually developed a process of creation through destruction.

In 1992 Hodges incorporated himself into the material of his pieces through the use of his saliva. He drew ink doodles of spider webs, clovers, chains, lines, spirals, and a matrix of dots, then blurred them with his saliva by pressing the wet images against another paper and created different printed impressions. Hodges said that by using his saliva with his materials, it revealed a "sensuous act", where his hand would draw the images and his mouth would transmit it. This expressed Hodges' empowerment, and was intended to disrupt the preconception of bodily fluids as something horrifying. Hodges had received more than one hundred translations in over seventy languages; the only country which refused to participate was the United States. Hodges described this work as a fragment of a continuum which could be added or reworked endlessly. Hodges attempted to mirror the content that shaped the life of Gonzalez Torres before he lost his battle with AIDS in 1996. The retrospective was accompanied by a large format appraisal of Hodges' work, edited by Jeffrey Grove and Olga Viso. Hodges' piece Don't Be Afraid was installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D. C. in 2005. A recent large scale sculpture, look and see (a nine ton stainless steel abstraction of camouflage) was purchased by the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York on October 30, 2006.