Creating what she terms “expanded paintings,” Harmony Hammond’s canvases challenge traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture, as well as art and craft. As she explains, “My work has a survivor aesthetic, which has to do with piecing things together and making something out of nothing. It’s about rupture, suture, and endurance.” Elaborating on these themes, Marker II (2011–2020) belongs to the artist’s body of near-monochrome paintings. Rife with latent color and what the artist terms “fugitive” surfaces that crack and are punctured, recalling skin and orifices, these works “perform queerly” alluding to, as Hammond writes, “what’s hidden, what’s … buried, muffled, pushing up from underneath.” Suggesting a near bodily presence, the built up surface of Marker II reinvigorates the modernist language of the monochrome by infusing it with content, re-presenting painting as, per Hammond, “a site of negotiation … between art and life.”