Going Through the Movements

Margaret Hodge (’25)

SEPTEMBER 23 — OCTOBER 11

stArt.rv, Reynolda Village

“Going Through the Movements is a series of paintings, prints, and drawings I have made over the past two years. The choice of material is intuitive and responds to the inspiration specific to each work. These manifest in oil on canvas, oil on wood board, intaglio, linocut, and graphite on paper.

During my freshman year of college, I took a course – Discovering the Avante-Garde – wherein I saw an image of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, (No.2) for the first time. It was as though a switch had been flipped in my brain, new synapses were forming because, for the first time, I saw my sense of time and fragmentation reflected in a work of art. Subsequently, I investigated aspects of Cubo-Futurism and Russian Constructivism through making my work.

The idea of collapsing, in an attempt to reclaim time and space, and overcome the constraints of movement, is cathartic to me. The simultaneity of being able to view something in its entirety, all at once, is a kind of sublime made up of many facets that I attempt to convey in my own work.

Theatre, dance, film, television, literature, poetry, history, song, and a multitude of works of art have and continue to inform my work. For me, Cubo-futurism and Russian Constructivism have a surprising sensuality and richness that I do not find in other approaches. Machinery seems to fragment into stained glass shards, movement is arrested in overlapping stop-motion, and space itself assumes geometry. A moment becomes dilated.

My artwork is my laboratory, the controlled environment in which the experience of time and the moment is captured.”

“It’s as if the painting, absolutely still, soundless, becomes a corridor connecting the moment it represents with the moment at which you are looking at it… throwing into question a way of measuring time itself.”

John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Episode 1