ANN HAMILTON | Selected Early Work: 1984-2010

"My first hand is a sewing hand. A line of thread drawn up and down through cloth influences how I think about the confluence and rhythms of space and time. The edition of ciliary began with the extension of a single line. Drawn, sewn, or written, a line contains all the attention present in its moment of making, the rhythms of breath and body, the weather of hesitations and the stutter of the hand orbiting in the body’s immediate periphery.  Folded, cut, or accreted, the line’s incessant horizontality returns to itself and takes a circular form. It is simple work; it requires the body to be slow. For me, the circle of the hand making is the first eye. It is the empty center in the tower, the clearing in the forest, where with the fundaments of cloth and paper and line we weave and re-weave unending relations." 

- ­­Ann Hamilton

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present “Select Early Work: 1984-2010,” an intimate showing of print, sculpture and photography for internationally recognized, American artist Ann Hamilton. Known for her large-scale multi-media installations, Hamilton’s sensory driven and deeply poetic work often merges the visual with both performance and sound-based expressions.  Working in uniquely innovative ways, the artist transforms the traditional mediums of printmaking, photography, video, sculpture and textile work, either by process or stance.  As a recognized McArthur Foundation Fellow, Hamilton’s genius brings with it a distinguished sense of the experimental as she approaches her on-going themes of the body and being with work that contains wide-ranging conceptual underpinnings. The current exhibition includes select large and small scale works from four different series produced over many years including “visite,” “ciliary,” “voce,” and “body objects.”

                 The complexly assembled “visite” print is based on photographs from 19^thC albumen prints the size of a calling card – cartes de visite – the artist re-photographed the faces with a miniature hand-held surveillance camera affixed to her finger. This imagery manifested as the dominant element in “visite,” a layered lithographed series with its chine colléd signature “O” and a wide band of richly colored fabric on diaphanous Japanese paper. Each remarkable work in the series affirms the artist’s contemplative and yet, startling union of image and material.

                For cilary, Art:21’s magazine from the award-winning PBS television series stated that “cilary” represents “a culmination of Hamilton’s decade-long collaborative relationship with the highly respected Gemini G.E.L. and marks a new level of achievement in her work with printmaking.  With a diameter of nearly five feet, each ciliary is a wall-mounted object of a human scale that yet lends a sense of quiet magnitude to the space it occupies. Comprised of accordion-folded lithographs that compress bands of meandering lines of varying intensity, each is punctuated by a burst of fabric in a coordinating color at the center. The form is at once familiar and mysterious, suggesting numerous associations, both natural and man-made:  the cross-section of an immense tree, a dancer’s unfurled skirt, a folded fan, an eye, or a seventeenth-century Dutch collar. These references spring naturally from the circular structure – a response Hamilton purposefully elicits from the viewer- born of her meditations on the timelessness of this shape and its symbolism across time and cultures.”

Ann Hamilton’s voce series (referencing the artist’s larger spinning spatial work entitled voce: house of the mouth), was published by the artist and Robischon Gallery in 2008. The evocative images exemplify the artist’s embrace of such interconnected relationships within her own vocabulary, from her captured video stills to the enveloping voce projection and performance first shown in Kumamoto, Japan. Emanating from five individual spinning projectors, the voce video and subsequent still images of faces or feet were part of an elaborate performance which also included an assembled installation of tables – stacked atop with carefully folded ceremonial kimonos, illuminated by a single desk lamp aside a vintage radio - all sheathed in diaphanous, silk organza. The site's large two-gallery spaces offered the opportunity for simultaneously paired performances - two languages and two species (human voice and songbird) creating thresholds of adjacency in contrast. In Hamilton’s artistic vocabulary the piece was intended to merge a condition of opposites: full/empty; above/below; light/dark; still/quickened, and weighted/weightlessness. The installation was further layered by intriguing unique performances by visitors. Each was invited to vocally improvise along with the prompts of a teaching CD to join in with a cacophonous chorus of bird calls which were earlier recorded in Japan by Hamilton. The artist’s sense of the universal with a reverence toward the distinct language of each being and place was also represented in voce by the symbolic images of the ancestors as the abiding “voice of memory.”  The piece in its entirety reflects this shared expression, the site from which each new generation makes its own stand as the various incarnations of voce aptly reveal the artist’s stratified and soulful stance.

The earliest works are Hamilton’s pivotal “body object” series which offers an historical look into the then young artist’s ingenious and multi-purpose conjunction of material and object as a sensory and psychological expression. By taking a singular element from a previous performance or installation and using it to become part of an editioned photographic series, the artist expanded her visual vocabulary to “fix an object within a particular moment in time.” For example, the prickly hide-like, toothpick suit which Hamilton created for her installation entitled, suitably positioned at Yale University, was worn for its performance variant at Franklin Furnace in New York (both in 1984), along with the duct work, flashlight, and fish-lure suits – and continue on as an image in Hamilton’s silver-print portraits. The dual calendar year assignment indicates the year the photograph was taken followed by the year the edition was published such as 1984/2006.

Referencing her site-generated, process-oriented installations and collaborative performances, Hamilton notes that her prints and objects “have their own resonance and consolidate the relationships that were part of a larger work.” Akin to the spirit of her installations, Hamilton’s objects address a kind of collective voicing that speak to the moment between the temporal and the fixed. As a provocative and influential voice in contemporary art for over four decades, Ann Hamilton continues to create environments and objects that are both sensory and intellectual explorations examining time, language, and memory. Recognized for creating new possibilities within the visual arts, her investigations integrate diverse art forms which further expand our collective vocabulary with originality and grace. 

Ann Hamilton was trained in textile design at the University of Kansas and received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 1985. Her work has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad, including major installations at La Maison Rouge, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The DIA Center, New York, The Tate Gallery, Liverpool, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and many more international venues such as the Gwangju Design Biennale in Gwangju, Korea in October 2011. Hamilton has been the recipient of some of the profession’s highest honors, including the National Medal of Art Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation Award, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities, the NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, the Aldrich Award, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hamilton has twice been selected to represent the US at major international contemporary art exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 1999, and the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1991. Hamilton is currently the Secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University where she has served on the faculty in the Department of Art since 2001.