JOHN HAWKE
John Hawke’s work began in on-site landscape painting practice. The performative nature of the artist in public space, and the inability of an optical approach to represent the landscape adequately developed over the years into an intention to understand the landscape conceptually as a snarled network of vectors of interest, with the artist having an interesting capability in rupturing these existing spatial conditions.
Using the principle of productive confusion developed through a collaborative platform entitled Orange Work, he has made architecture and sign interventions in public space for the past seven years. He aims to make work that forces the viewer to be folded back upon their own assumptions to navigate the the valence jumping nature of the work: seemingly official or fraudulent, a joke or a mistake.
He studied classics at Colby College, and went to Pratt Institute for graduate MFA study in 1999, where he also received an MS degree in art history with a thesis on Robert Smithson’s environmental antagonism. He participated in the Whitney Independent study program in 2006, is currently a participant in the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Art and Law Residency Program.
His work has been widely exhibited, presented and reviewed including in New York at Apex Art, the Abrons Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, Art in General, Creative Time, and Eyebeam, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, Chichester House in the UK, at the Susquehanna Museum of Art and most recently at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
His work has been presented at the New Museum, PS.1, the New School’s Vera List Center, and the College Art Association, and reviewed in the New York Times, Flash Art, Architect’s Newspaper, the Radical History Review, the Brooklyn Rail, and rhizome.org. His studio productions are represented by the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Pace Editions in New York
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