Pamela Ellis Hawkes
Archives and Artifacts

Archives and Artifacts is Hawkes’s second solo exhibition at Trident Gallery and will be on view July 2–31. Gallery hours during the exhibition are Saturday 10–7; Friday, Sunday, and Monday 10–5; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday 12–5, and by appointment. The gallery will host a public reception for the artist on Saturday, July 9, 6–8pm.

Hawkes’s recent work, like her earlier work, responds to artistic traditions of past centuries with a playful contemporary spirit, a sense of humor, and a keen eye for seductively mysterious beauty. One of the three groups of photographs in Archives and Artifacts incorporates and modifies images of 17th-century flower paintings, a tradition of ornate, detailed, even flamboyant paintings combining advanced technical skill with imagination and intricate conventions of symbolism to address themes of beauty, wealth, abundance, and death. Today, the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum which owns a major collection of these paintings, encourages visitors to its website to use images of these paintings on T-shirts and iPhone cases. Hawkes responds to these widely different attitudes with photographs that challenge her viewers’ ideas of high and low art.
Another series in Archives and Artifacts examines the subject of flower paintings through witty parallel constructions which reveal and challenge viewers’ expectations from photographs and realist painting traditions. With like thoughtfulness and humor, a third series of photographs examines the motivations and satisfactions of collecting objects.

Another series in Archives and Artifacts examines the subject of flower paintings through witty parallel constructions which reveal and challenge viewers’ expectations from photographs and realist painting traditions. With like thoughtfulness and humor, a third series of photographs examines the motivations and satisfactions of collecting objects.

Pamela Ellis Hawkes lives and works in Rockport MA. Her photographs are in significant public and private collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover MA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Polaroid Collection, the Wiggin Prints and Drawings Collection of the Boston Public Library, and the Danforth Museum (Framingham MA). Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Houston Center for Photography, Pepper Gallery (Boston), and other galleries in Texas and New England. Her work has been published in Rangefinder, Lenswork, Camera and Darkroom, and other publications.