ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum is proud to present internationally renowned American conceptual artist Jim Hodges’ new site-inspired exhibition you will see these things through Sunday, May 3, 2009.

Through a wide range of materials and a thoroughly poetic sensibility, Jim Hodges creates glimpses into the ecstatic qualities of fleeting personal experiences. Often reconfiguring commonplace materials through isolated, repeated gestures, Hodges’s transformation of objects as diverse as fake flowers and light bulbs becomes an accessible and engaging study of beauty and impermanence.

you will see these things is inspired by a vision that the artist had when he first entered the space nearly two years ago. Explaining that all artwork exists first as something inside of his body that he merely releases, Hodges’ installation utilizes theatrical elements, including an elaborately constructed stage set and gelled lights. The artist both anchors and frees the environment with a golden straw that starts at mouth height in the gallery, punctures the museum’s interior and roof, and extends an additional eight feet towards the sky.

In addition, Hodges provided the text-based artwork Give More Than You Take for the 2008/09 edition of the ongoing Aspen Art Museum/Aspen Skiing Company lift ticket partnership—the fourth in as many years for the collaboration. On the exterior of the museum during you will see these things, Hodges has also hung three large flags adorned with the ticket image. Like most great wisdom, Give More Than You Take is a simultaneously simple and complex idea. The text references philanthropy, environmental awareness, corporate responsibility, Buddhist practice, and the overall concept of just being a good person and doing the right thing.

Jim Hodges lives and works in New York City . His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Dallas Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and The Musée National Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Tate in London. Hodges was featured in the AAM’s group exhibition Like color in pictures and was recipient of the Aspen Art Museum ’s “Aspen Award for Art” in 2007. Hodges’ 2009 exhibition schedule will also include solo exhibitions at the Pompidou, Paris —touring to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin , and the Camden Arts Centre in London . Recent solo exhibitions include CRG Gallery, New York (2008); Look and See, Creative Time Commission at the Ritz Carlton Plaza, Battery Park, New York, NY, (2005); and, Jim Hodges: This line to you, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (CGAC), Santiago de Compostello, Spain (2004).