Richard Hawkins

Richard Telles presents an exhibition of photo and polaroid collages by Richard Hawkins from 1986 to present.

Never exhibited, using “do not bend” stiffeners, photo mailers and Kodak boxes (obtuse references to the use of letters and newspapers to denote the passage of time in the trompe l’oeil paintings of Edward Collier) as supports, these works were made preceding, concurrently and far after the artist’s well-known iris prints of his 1995 “c. 1975–76: (w/ matt Dillon as my boyfriend at the time)” exhibition.

In each work, Hawkins features photographs of Dillon at the pink-tipped pinnacle of his androgyny. Polaroid screengrabs from the 1980 teen-flick “Little Darlings” co-starring Kristy McNichol are their source. Bathed in the foreboding red and pallid blue glow of the television screen from which they were taken, (the polaroids date from 1986, when the pausing of a vcr only created wavy RGB noise, making the catching of a wow-moment a stalker/sniper’s game of wait-wait-wait-wait-NOW!) the actor is both icon and blood-drenched embodiment.

Hawkins’s work is often based in scholarly research and spirals out of an ever-evolving personal atlas. The materials for this particular body of work have been collected, stored, brought out, fiddled with and put away for decades. They index a moment – an actor’s smirk, a vcr’s pause, the spitting out of a polaroid – which, over time, be it the length of a movie, the time it takes for today to become yesterday, for a fan letter to be mailed, rejected and returned (or especially for 1976 to flash forward to 2017) it – that moment —neither strengthens or fades. This moment persists (as the titles of these works suggest) as one approaches wondering why, as one then resides within that why and as one eventually rejects comfortable explanations for how desiring instants endure.

Richard Hawkins is the 2017-18 Hayden Distinguished Fellow at the Yale School of Art. His most recently held solo exhibitions at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Greene-Naftali, New York; and Goton, Paris in 2016. Hawkins was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, which travelled to the Hammer Museum in 2011. He lives and works in Los Angeles.