Black Ground: In the Service of Others
2019
Reggie Burrows Hodges
Maine
Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.
About Reggie Burrows Hodges
Reggie Burrows Hodges (b. 1965, Compton, CA) is a Maine-based painter whose works explore storytelling and visual metaphor. His large-scale paintings—rendered in acrylic and pastel on raw canvas—explore universal subjects such as identity, community, truth, and memory, and often draw inspiration from his childhood in Compton. Starting from a black ground, he develops the scene around his figures with painterly, foggy brushwork, playing with how perception is affected when the descriptive focus is placed not on human agents but on their surroundings. Figures materialize in recessive space, stripped of physical identifiers. Bodies are described by their painted context, highlighting Hodges’s embrace of tenuous ambiguities and his close observation of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Their quiet haziness, developed with the soft touch of Hodges’s hand, probes the imprecision of memory and examines the possibility that we are all products of our environment. Hodges studied theatre and film at the University of Kansas. In early 2021, Hodges will have a solo exhibition at Karma, New York. As the 2019 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Hodges will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Maine in 2022.
Program Participation
Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2020
Website / Social Links
My practice has been inspired by the study of moments and translating the essence of them through color, figuration, abstraction, and various techniques of mark making. I paint frequently in series. I'm interested in intersecting an internal experience and symbolizing that in my work in order to present a view of my personal heritage and journey.”
