Plinth

In the first room, the white marble of Craig’s closet (2024) lends a Taj Mahal monumentality: where Shah Jahan’s 17th century mausoleum sought to honour his beloved wife with its domes and minarets, symmetry and harmony, Craig’s closet clings to fact and order, any sort of order – the neatness of T-shirts lined up on hangers – in its undeniable mournfulness. In choosing marble and painted bronze to render something so unassuming, the work at once sanctifies and estranges. It is difficult not to think about money, the ostentatiousness of the materials – yet maybe excess is the point. Grief is as profound as it is ordinary, an experience at once universal and annihilating, mundane and immeasurable. The work is sad. Soft cloth and familiar scent have been made hard and cold, drained of colour. The intimacy – the folds of each T-shirt frozen in time – is almost obscene. Another version of Craig’s closet (2023), in black, is installed at the AIDS Memorial Park in New York City. I wouldn’t like to come across it on a rainy day.

Hodges, since the late eighties, has cultivated a body of work that operates in an intimate register, gestures that trace the contours of love, loss, beauty, and desire. Spiderwebs recur, delicate and unshakeable, evoking both natural grace and our precarious hold on a wind-buffeted life. In the shadow of the AIDS crisis, his floral works assumed the solemnity of wreaths – all the while retaining an undeniable sweetness, as though plucked from a Disney idyll.

In awaiting, (a study of time) (2025), sweetness is all the more conspicuous. Packets of sweets—bright, perishable, alluring—are enshrined within stacked plastic storage bins, like a strange reliquary of- what? A six-year-old’s fantasy? Hedonism? The everyday? Hodges’ practice often aligns with Duchamp’s dictum that ‘the viewer completes the work,’ yet here, the exchange feels particularly enigmatic, withheld, perhaps artefacts for some unknowable future posterity – yes, we really used to eat food like this and store it in those. This is the paradox at the heart of Hodges’ practice: the more he insists on remembrance, the more he underscores the inevitability of loss.

In the dim light of the final room, a garage space emerges like an apparition from the Louisiana bayou. Stepping inside, the viewer is met with the woody spice of aftershave, the hush of dust settling on old tools, an orangey light. Titled double portrait: father and son (2025), it speaks to inheritance and hums with the resonance of things handled, left behind. What remains is both a balm and a wound.

Hodges reminds us that memory is always material—weighty, luminous, elusive. We need only tune in, just as Hodges’ garage invites us to listen—to the creak of a wooden floor, the scent of dust stirred in the air. In many ways, It Only Takes a Minute speaks to time as an expanse, a vast distance stretched thin—until, one minute, suddenly, it isn’t. What only takes a minute? We like to believe that change is slow, arduous, a process to be worked through. Yet some of life’s most seismic shifts happen in an instant—swift and exacting. No amount of marble, bronze or monumentalising can change that fact. That knowledge is at once brutal and compelling. Heavy, perhaps even hopeful.

By Sammi Gale

Cover image: Jim Hodges, double portrait: father and son (2025)