Art Exhibit: Hands on Fire

Jim Cogswell: Hands on Fire

August 31 to October 9, 2026
Public Reception: Friday, September 18, 4:30 to 6:30 pm

Jim Cogswell’s Hands on Fire is a solo exhibition of mixed media drawings at the Residential College Gallery at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The exhibition features sixty works on paper completed between 2024 and 2026.

This body of work responds to Greek Cypriot filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis’ cinematic adaptations of three tragedies by Euripides dealing with the Trojan War and its aftermath: Electra (1962), The Trojan Women (1971), and Iphigenia (1977). The work is in close conversation with Vinyl Euripides (2022), Cogswell’s adhesive vinyl installation on three floors of the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, Greece, which also responded to the cinematic trilogy. By following Cacoyannis’ adaptations, Cogswell builds on a cross-cultural history of restaging these tragedies to examine the human suffering caused by war, imperial overreach, and abuse of power; and the dehumanizing consequences of revenge as a course of justice.

Within each drawing multiple scenes from the three narratives are overlaid within single frames, suggesting the unseen entanglements that bind these ancient stories into such a persistent vision of our human position.

The grid of paintings encircling the gallery proposes a linear narrative but delivers instead a sequence that loops and turns on itself, a stuck frame that stutters until bursting in flames. The grid also evokes the net that is a central feature of the series--the web of fate and circumstance that governs each of our lives, that determines who we are and what is possible for us at any given moment in history.

The drawings are also characterized by a repeated motif of hands as consuming flames. Hands have unlimited expressive and narrative potential. They testify to the centrality of making in the development of human cognition. They are reminders of the constructed world and the laborers responsible for bringing it into being. We use hands as a form of communication to shape and express our inner states. Hands teach us to feel and to reason, to count and to indicate. They give us agency, as creators but also as destroyers. They give form to our willingness to act in the world, in greed or compassion.

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This exhibition is made possible with funding from the Stamps School of Art & Design and the University of Michigan Office of Research.

From the Artist

I am grateful to the Modern Greek Program in the Department of Classical Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, for their ongoing support for my research and the dissemination of this project.