Debra Hampton: Twenty Paces

I can't wait for Thursday to finally get here! My friend Debra Hampton, artist of the beautiful, has an opening for her spectacular Twenty Paces.

From the official announcement:

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present Twenty Paces, Debra Hampton’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. With reference to the practice of pistol dueling, and the distance at which craftsmen once tested the impregnability of bodily armor, Twenty Paces reflects on identity formation—the protective guard and the multiple layers of gender-based persona, shaped by social perception amid a disparaging world of distress, desire and consumption.

Hampton guides us into a universe, inhabited by seemingly fragmentized, luxurious creatures, using magazine cut-outs to collage complexly woven female figures created equally by mechanical and organic elements such as car parts, weapons, jewelry and human anatomy over an initially automatic abstract ink drawing, an amalgam of drips and splashes, to develop intricate compositions, miraculously assembling in front of the viewer. Introducing life-size, hollow suits of armor, constructed of post-consumer waste, recycled plastic, Hampton, explores further the discourse between a charged sexualized identity and its mechanism of defense.

Hampton’s striking heroines, part goddess, part warrior, adorned with corsets and armor, hover conceptually between the historic and the utopian, captured in an ambiguous moment of creation and obliteration, ultimately portraying the fragile equilibrium of a world threatened by ecological catastrophe and economical excess at the brink of disaster.

During a studio visit to see Debra's work, I was reminded of nothing so much as my favorite line of the Sufi mystic poet, Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.

I love Debra's work for its spectacular compositional beauty, palette, sense of motion and panache. Even in the absence of any further understanding about the way she layers shapes (pistols, gems, delicate fronds reminiscent of the beach), her work undeniably broadcasts the zeitgeist of the era in which it is being created--which is ultimately the hallmark of all great art.

Debra layers meticulously cut magazine pages, ink and watercolor to create ethereal and yet powerful visages of warrior women, nearly robotic but also completely, at least to my eye, human. That is, of course, one of the great ethical dilemmas of our time, this melding of machine and human consciousness and confusion about what is real and what isn't.

With imagination-scapes routinely projected into immersive digital media, and now the advent of augmented reality, Debra's work takes on a cautionary note but also a hopeful one that beauty can always be created--even from the plastic take-out containers choking our oceans and planet and the plastic toy guns that teach children to mimic lethal combat before they even understand the awesome responsibility of being human.


One of my mannequins from the Imagination Age Salon served as a model for some of Debra's work on the armor. I was privileged as Debra's friend to watch her process unfold in layers, like her work itself, and I can hardly wait for Thursday. The piece shown left in the above image, "Stream of Change (Plus a Key, Four Wheels and a handful of Hearts) is now part of my cherished collection.

Debra Hampton was born in Fullerton, CA and currently lives and works in New York, NY. Her work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including shows at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts in New York, NY; and the Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY. Her work belongs to several collections including the Permanent Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Los Angeles, CA.