Artist Lisa Hoke is fascinated by the relationship between advertising and culture. Commercial images, she said, are often tied in people’s minds to specific periods of the nation’s history.
SPRINGFIELD – A profusion of colors undulates across a wall, swirling, protruding, receding, spiraling between sculpture and bas-relief.
This is “Love, American Style,” an enormous installation by artist Lisa Hoke at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield through May 26, 2013.
The exhibition is made up of thousands of pieces of familiar packaging and advertising – the greens of Swiffer and Gatorade, the reds of Coca Cola and popcorn boxes, the pink of Good & Plenty candy, the colors of tissue boxes, paper plates, plastic cups, matchbooks, wrappers and other ephemera.
Hoke, who lives in New York, was in Springfield Friday to talk about the things that some people throw away – and that she turns into art.
“Paper cups give me infinite patterns,” she said.
She keeps her finds in bins in her studio, arranged by color. She works out her visions on the floor (“totally spontaneous,” she said – no sketches ahead of time), delivers them in sections when she has a show, and puts the final product together on site.
Hoke collects her materials in quantity, often using the same image over and over again to create something entirely new.
For example, at one point museum-goers will see the same color ads for French fries radiating concentrically like a dazzling yellow dandelion with a four-foot head.
Sometimes Hoke includes logos and brand names, allowing the lettering to become part of the design. “It’s called appropriated art,” said Julia Courtney, director of art at the D’Amour Museum, who invited Hoke to the museum after reading about her in ArtNews.
Hoke is fascinated by the relationship between advertising and culture. Commercial images, she said, are often tied in people’s minds to specific periods of the nation’s history.
That gives a certain intimacy to her art. She looks for a balance between the intimate and the monumental, she said.
Hoke majored in English at the University of North Carolina, then studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University and Florida State University.
She moved to New York in 1980. “My art education began the day I moved to New York City,” she said.
She has had more than 20 solo exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art and other museums.
Hoke is married to filmmaker David Bemis. Their son, Matthew, attends Hampshire College in Amherst.
The D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts is at 21 Edwards St. Closed Mondays. Free parking. Admission fee ($12.50 for adults; discounts for seniors, students) allows entry to all museums on the Quadrangle.