“I have thought about posterity all my life. There isn’t as much adventure and creative unfolding as there is in planting a garden and watching it grow. It’s like watching the film grow, because you don’t know what the seed of an idea is going to actually result in.” – Barbara Hammer

To honor what would have been the artist’s 84th birthday this May, Company is pleased to present Barbara Hammer, Available Space, on view from April 29 – June 3, 2023. The exhibition is comprised of three films that span the 70s, 80s, and the early 2000s, taking its title from Hammer’s 1979 film of the same name, characterized by the artist’s aim to liberate the medium from the confines by which it had become known. The film represents Hammer’s early efforts aimed to empower, activate, and “make blood rush through the veins” of the viewing public. ‘Available Space’ works in hindsight as an anchor– the beginning broad strokes of experimentation that set Hammer on course to become one of the preeminent avant-garde filmmakers of her time.

Available Space (1979) synthesizes Hammer’s most pronounced thematic interests: the camera in relation to the queer body, the body in performance, a performance in space, and her own capacity to unify or subvert these elements. This early film sees Hammer manipulating technical aspects of filmmaking. Manual adjustments to the speed of the frame and the layering of negatives articulate a body in flux. Made for performance, Hammer created this film to be shown on a 360 degree rotary projection table in the interest of testing the limitations of the projector’s beam and exploring the relationships between image and architectural space.

Optic Nerve (1985) is a deeply personal film on family and aging. The artist remains critically aware of her own mortality, leveraging the fragility of the 16mm film and the pollution of light to reflect how delicate the medium can be. Though Barbara’s hand is heavy with experimentation, in this film, she brings a tenderness to the rigidity of the celluloid as she shifts focus to the film’s central subject, her ailing grandmother.

A Horse is Not a Metaphor (2008) finds the artist confronting death through a rallying cry of human resilience. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, Hammer was unsure whether she would make another film at all. Instead, she returned to the medium as a testament to and celebration of her capacity to thrive despite the perceived limitations of her diagnosis. With much of the footage shot riding horseback across the United States, Barbara finds true freedom and hope riding her horse through the open landscape.

Barbara Hammer was a feminist filmmaker, visual artist, and lesbian activist with a career spanning over fifty years — constructing revelations on gender, sexuality, community, and later illness and mortality. She produced over 90 films, ranging from experimental shorts to essays, and full-length documentaries as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages, and drawings, that illuminate lesbian histories, lives, and representations. In her work, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human.

Hammer’s films have been featured at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Kunsthall, Oslo, Norway; Toronto Film Festival; and Pink Life Queer Festival, Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey. Recent solo exhibitions include Women I Love at Ratio 3, San Francisco in 2022; Tell me there is a lesbian forever… at Company Gallery, New York in 2021; Sisters! at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona in 2020; In this Body at the Wexner, Columbus in 2019; and Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979 at Company Gallery, New York in 2017. In 2017 Barbara Hammer’s retrospective Evidentiary Bodies was presented at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Hammer’s work was included in the 1985, 1989, 1993, and 2019 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne. She is the author of ‘Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life‘, Feminist Press, 2009. In 2017 Hammer’s paper archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The same year she established the Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant through Queer Art and the Barbara Hammer Grant in Queer Cinema at San Francisco State University. In 2021 the Estate endowed the grant at the SFSU Queer Cinema Project. Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, CA and died in 2019 in New York, NY.