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Jim Hodges American, born 1957 look and see, 2005 Enamel on stainless steel Overall: 138 x 300 x 144 inches (350.52 x 762 x 365.76 cm) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York - Official website Jim Hodges is best known for creating poetic spectacles that employ evocative materials such as artificial flowers, gold leaf, denim, and thread. However, Hodges believes that any concept or medium can become an occasion for inventive transformation. In look and see, for example, the artist plays on the capriciousness of human perception. The work’s undulating surface of highly polished and painted stainless steel is perforated with cutouts that are at first nearly invisible, hidden by the sculpture’s highly reflective exterior and overall pattern of light and dark. The warped environment at once challenges our visual acuity and suggests a theoretical game of hide-and-go-seek between viewers and their surroundings. The camouflage-like mirrored surface of look and see also presents an industrialized interpretation of the landscape, calling into question the ways in which contemporary culture has blurred the distinction between nature and its artifice. - Albright-Knox  (online Jan 2020)

Jim Hodges—a internationally renowned artist who transforms ordinary objects into poetic spectacles—brought his largest work to date to the Albright-Knox’s Sculpture Garden in the summer of 2006. This sculpture, entitled look and see, is a nearly 12-foot, twisting plane of stainless steel with a surface that has been cut with a laser, polished, and painted black and white to create a stylized camouflage pattern, which includes reflective areas through which one can see the surrounding architecture. As a result, the sculpture becomes an installation, quietly and sensually reorienting your experience in its environment. This work was originally a public art commission for Creative Time’s Art on the Plaza, located at The Ritz-Carlton New York, Battery Park. Better known for creating “paintings” with shards from mirrors, light bulbs, cut photographs, and fans of delicate, brightly-hued pencil marks, Hodges continues to focus on the discovery and pleasure of seeing familiar things in new and different ways. His work was included in the Albright-Knox’s past exhibition Extreme Abstraction, and an important mid-career survey exhibition recently closed after traveling the country. - Albright-Knox (online Jan 2020)

August 2019 Photos The original location of the sculpture was in the Albright-Knox outdoor courtyard.  It was moved here in 2018.