Simple.  Basic.  That is how life and art look to spectators when perfected.  The complexities are there for those that look closely, but the average person should easily determine what an artist is trying to say.  Jane Hammond’s mastery of this skill is one reason why her “Six Sets” piece currently showing at the Chazen Museum of Art can attract even the casual observer.

Simple.  Six identical televisions hang on the wall, each on a different “channel,” each channel a human trait.  Color and depth make the carved wood sets pop from the paper, while the television concept evokes simplicity.  The sets are an old design of a bygone era when televisions had separate dials for UHF and VHF; a time before the flick of a remote could provide access to hundreds of channels.

Hammond’s uses a collection of 276 found images in all her work from this period.  The images that reside on the televisions are visible throughout her collection.  The six traits used by Hammond are easily grasped, even without the note cards that list their names; Faith, Insight, Kinship, Patience, Perception, and Fairness.
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