New York mixed media artist Jane Hammond spent several days on her hands and knees last week, installing a very special work at the Taubman Museum of Art. “Fallen,” on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is a touring, ongoing piece that memorializes those who have fought and died in the Iraq War.
More than 4000 handmade leaves feature the name of a fallen U.S. soldier, and Hammond takes great care to place those leaves just so every time she installs Fallen, which opened last week at the Taubman. “I do put the leaves down one at a time, and I think as I’m doing it,” said Hammond, who had help for the first two days of the installation process.
“After a while I don’t want any help,” said Hammond, who has never worked on a project of this scale. Since Fallen is not really her concept, Hammond calls herself “somewhat less of an author and more of a witness in this case … which is a very unusual thing for an artist.”
“This is actually its fifth museum show [on tour],” said Hammond. It first was installed at the Whitney in 2006. Hammond says most people see it as intended: as a memorial to those who have died in the Iraqi theater. “I didn’t mean it as an antiwar piece,” she claims. “I meant it as a tribute and memorial. There’s a kind of gentle quality about it. It’s sad; it’s not angry.”
Hammond said the impact of seeing all those fallen leaves with names inscribed on them is profound. “One of the things I hear from people a lot is ‘oh my gosh, it’s so many’. There’s something about numbers that condenses something that is very multifold into something that is very small and simple. That’s what numbers are about.”
Each of the leaves in Fallen has their own characteristics, and the individual names on each “have a great deal of character and specificity about them as well,” said Hammond. It forces people to focus “on the very young lives that have been lost…there’s something slow about the piece,” she adds.
Fallen will be on display until January 11, 2011. As to what people may think about a work she calls evocative and poetic: “you can’t completely dictate what it is people come away with,” said Jane Hammond. “Different people come away with different things … but I do think they come away with a period of time in which they’ve focused on these other people who have given their lives in the service of their country – and the sadness of that.”
By Gene Marrano [email protected]