Lisa Hoke

[8][9] Hoke first gained recognition in the 1990s as one of a number of sculptors that mined the domestic sphere for materials and ideas, in her case, mixing elements of formalism and postminimalism, Pop assemblage, and social, often feminist, commentary.

[5][26] Hoke's work has been largely driven by her progression through a range of unexpected, often quirky raw materials—auto parts, textiles and domestic objects, consumer detritus and packaging—and the intuitive processes she has discovered for transforming them.

[8][11] Her turn to repurposed consumer objects, however, introduced the broader color spectrum into her practice, directing her focus toward painterly concerns with chroma, pattern and surface in work that drew comparisons to Jessica Stockholder.

[29][8][18] Critic Lucy Lippard wrote that these pieces sketched barely visible energy patterns and posed weighty questions about physical reality using minimal means (e.g., Magnet, 1989),[22] a quality she likened to Eva Hesse works that "endow[ed] formal austerity with subtle emotional resonance.

[34][29] In the 1990s, critics such as Eleanor Heartney noted Hoke's shift toward denser, more playful hanging pieces that reworked the low-brow, recycled junk aesthetic of Pop assemblage and Arte Povera through a process-oriented, feminist sensibility.

[28][38][7][39] The sculpture Manifold Destiny (1991) was a notable example—a hanging assemblage of yellow and pink plastic patio furniture stripping increasingly entangled in rusted car mufflers and snaking exhaust pipes that suggested entropy.

[7] Critics likened the 12-foot work's appearance to "a grandmother's unraveled afghan,"[41] sea corals or tangled hair and its calligraphic patterns and process to Abstract Expressionism, a debt referenced in the double meaning of its title.

[3][19][27] Reviews in the New York Times and New Art Examiner compared the sheets to stained glass, stage sets and fantastical tapestries, their absurdity tempered by the Rube Goldberg-like intricacy of the installation and formal tension between playful sculptural forms and gallery architecture.

[5][24][14] Critics such as Stephen Westfall related the abstract "tidal pulls and arabesques of color and fanning forms" of this work in formal terms to artists like Klimt and contemporaries Polly Apfelbaum, Judy Pfaff and Tony Feher, while noting its commentary on the simultaneous pleasures and horrors of marketing, material excess and mass consumption.

[14][9][48] Hoke created four versions (of up to 75 feet long) of her first-such work, Love, American Style (2011–2), at MASS MoCA, Elizabeth Harris, J. Johnson Gallery and D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts.