HAMZAT INCORPORATED: Massachusettsmode
September 6 - October 19, 2024
Public reception: Friday, September 6, 5:30 – 8 pm
Artist talk with Julie Beck: Saturday, September 7, 3 pm
Essay by Simon Brewer:
Hamzat Incorporated (ne Raheem) is an artist who often introduces himself as someone from Milton, MA by way of Nigeria and Japan. While seeming as though a mere formality in conversation, this introduction speaks to the greater makeup of what has shaped Hamzat’s identity, important life experiences, and background as an artist. This is further exemplified by his academic history, which includes studies at Kyoto Seika University, the Studio della Statua in Florence, and the Cooper Union, where he earned his B.F.A. in 2017. Having maintained somewhat of an inventive mobile studio over the last four years, marked by Wanderjahr style sojourns in Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, New York, Berlin, Portugal, and beyond, Hamzat’s work functions as a vessel for exploring new frontiers of creativity from the unique disposition of an ever mobile, global citizen. Nonetheless, Massachusetts continues to persist as a fundamental home base and source of inspiration for the artist. Everything from large scale civil engineering projects, such as the monumental Big Dig, to the sculpture collections at the Museum of Fine Arts become folded into the boundless imagination of Hamzat Incorporated and brought to life in his industrious studio in Milton. Thus, Massachusetts Mode is a show that serves as a unifying gesture, connecting the practices of the home and mobile studio, and more broadly, bridging the artist's internal world with the external world through personally cultivated tools of navigation.
Hamzat’s work is positioned at a juncture where Greco-Roman artistic and aesthetic conventions are subverted by contemporary modes of craft and image making. The stone sculptures, plaster castings, drawings, furniture, and video that make up Massachusetts Mode are forged from a place where the technologies of the past, present, and future converge. The drawings in the show resemble renderings on nearly grid-like planes, functioning within the flat landscape of an invisible Cartesian coordinate system. They serve as preparatory works for sculpture and function as two-dimensional sculptures themselves. This precise transition, or rather graduation, from granular drawing to sculpture is further emphasized by Hamzat’s use of a pointing machine. Perfected by the Italian Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova as a mechanical tool for carving stone, this ancient device is repurposed by Hamzat as an analog 3D mapping tool, where form emerges through a constellation of points arranged along a reference model. In essence, it functions as an archaic mode of 3D printing. However, works such as Stone of Sex (2015-2021) extend beyond the limitations of these traditional static devices, demonstrating how 3D scanning can serve as a modern form of mold-making. In this sculpture, Hamzat highlights the archival nature of mold-making and presents 3D scanning as a contemporary counterpart. Through this process, he illustrates how his sculptures can be documented, destroyed, and yet remain as repeatable units, preserved and recreated through digital means.
Hamzat contends the use of a pointing machine with the purity of direct carving, which involves chiseling the stone without any model or apparatus. Direct carving represents a more romantic approach to sculpting, echoing Michelangelo's notion of “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”. While Michelangelo’s posthumous legacy posits Non finito as the ideal artistic virtue, Hamzat instead embraces the concept of Infinito—reaching the infinite in sculpture through a series of permutations where the threshold of materiality lapses in an endless cycle of dust to stone and back to dust again. Throughout this show, across a broad spectrum of media, Hamzat explores the emergence of an infinite number of identities from an infinite amount of matter and material. Consequently, Hamzat's work is in constant pursuit of a Z-axis. This pursuit is perhaps best articulated through Trouble Maker: Boy With Pipe (2024), a self-portrait of the artist as a unicorn. In this piece, Hamzat alludes to the concept of a unicorn as it is known in investment terms—a privately held startup company valued at $1 billion or more. Together with the drawing Me as a Girl, Trouble Maker becomes an important work that signifies self-transformation, actualization, and self-evaluation, both literally and metaphorically. It grapples with modern notions of the artist as a business, or even more so, as a corporation.
Hamzat’s plaster face castings explore the human and cyborgian condition as we move closer towards a purely digital age. This novel approach to portrait-making focuses on archiving human identity and distilling the ways in which personally distinct features coalesce in the face. With the goal of collecting 1,000 faces, this ongoing project seeks to challenge Dunbar's number—a theoretical cognitive limit proposing that humans can maintain around 150 meaningful relationships. Hamzat tests the elasticity of this theorem by producing free-standing double portrait sculptures, where two identities are welded into one, reminiscent of a Janus coin or a family portrait. Many of the castings bear a subtle wound, suggesting something deeper than mere cosmetic branding. Branding is a key element in Hamzat’s work, reflecting his Yoruba heritage and the cultural significance of bodily markings within the Yoruba tradition.
New technological innovations continue to spur Hamzat’s artistic research and creative liberties. Technology has been a constant companion for the artist, who, after suffering a stroke at the age of 24, now lives with a Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker. This experience has heightened his awareness of both his mobility and mortality, and at times has challenged his ambidexterity. Hamzat promotes the use of A.I. within his studio practice as a collaborative mode of intuitive draftmaking. He is attracted to the rogue use of AI and the democratization of shared information, believing that everyone deserves equal access to the highest level of information within today's digital landscape. Much in the same way Hamzat wields the chisel as a tool for mining stone, he employs A.I. as a tool for mining intellectual curiosity. Therefore, while Hamzat shows his deference to the artists and traditions of the past, he reveals his marked difference by challenging old paradigms and blind spots with new technologies. Hamzat’s guiding principle, encapsulated in his mantra “Until they break, laws are like stone,” reverberates throughout Massachusetts Mode, leading him to new horizons of expression both within and outside of the exhibition space.