A pioneer of feminist and queer discourse, Harmony Hammond’s recent paintings’ focus on materiality and the indexical derives from and remains in conversation with her feminist work of the 1970s. In Blackjack, she utilizes grommets, straps, rope, and layers of oil paint to build a sculptural textured surface. The work emerges from what Hammond calls her 'near monochromes,' which simultaneously engage with and challenge the narrative of modernist painting by positioning the medium as a site of negotiation between what exists inside and outside the picture plane. Challenging divisions between painting and sculpture, in Blackjack (2016-17), Hammond uses straps and rope as sculptural elements. She allows cords to project and hang from the canvas’ surface and even loops and knots a length of the material—a crude suture—to the strapping. In this context, Hammond explains, 'the grommeted straps are wrapped around the painting as objects and body (suggesting bandage, bondage, binding) but do not cinch or constrict. The straps do not hold the painting together; the paint (and therefore the act of painting) does.' As the curator and art historian Tirza True Latimer expands, '[Straps and ropes] thematise seams in ways that evoke—not unity and purity—but the piecing together … associated with traditionally feminine creative acts.'