Ann Hamilton
(1956 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Ann Hamilton |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Ohio, USA |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1956 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
http://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/ |
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Instilation art
Textile design
Photographaphy |
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Biography
After studying textiles at the University of Kansas Ann Hamilton trained in sculpture at Yale University. She has become one of the leading contemporary installation artists. Hamilton's identity as a woman is a major factor in her work, she has said: 'My experience is female. That determines a lot of what I make. But I don't think I'm an essentialist'
Hamilton has put 'feminine' rituals and woman's work at the center of her practice. A particular kind of ritual, which Hamilton shared with another woman, has been a lasting influence: when she was small, Hamilton remembers, her grandmother would read to her. Now, the literature she admires and draws upon includes the writings of the feminist writer and philosopher Helene Cixious and the poet and academic Anne Carson. Hamilton has incorporated writing, both texts and whole books, into her art, notably Jorie Graham's poem about Penelope at her loom, referring to both Hamilton's own personal history, and to art history (this figure from Classical myth was an important subject for Angelica Kauffman two centuries earlier), and Angela Carter's retelling of the story of little Red Riding Hood. The raw materials Hamilton uses are also associated with femininity. In (mattering) (1997), billowing silk and bundles of typewriter ribbon were combined with a parade of live peacocks. Embroidery has appeared in a number of works, including (bounden) (1997), and (kaph) (1998). The fabrication of Hamilton's work often involves a series of tiny, repetitive tasks reminiscent of the craft techniques used by women in the home. And she often works collaboratively to make her installations. Orchestrating groups that have included her mother, an echo of the tradition of women joining together to make quilts to mark important life events. To heighten the sense of the painstaking delicacy of the processes she uses, Hamilton often includes a lone figure in her installations, engaged in some sort of concentrated activity, such as sewing. These figures represent subject, object and witness, messing up the traditionally clear divisions and relationship between artist/model, art object and spectator.
Hamilton's desire to stimulate all enveloping sensual responses to her installations in the gallery visitor can also be seen in feminist terms, informed by her awareness of the privileging of sight in much conventional fine art practice, and the transformation of women into spectacular objects. She has said: 'for me it's a question of trying to address some hierarchies and habits that determine how we assign certain perceptions more value or more authority over others-'"' Hamilton's installation Mneme, made at Tate Liverpool in 1994, made use of a series of rooms in the warehouse buildings of the Albert Dock. The first held a glass display case, whose panes were fogged with condensation, preventing you from seeing its contents- Moving forwards, you parted and closed curtains as you went, and then, shuttled up in a lift through the floors towards daylight, where a man stood, turning and returning a record by hand. The different sensations, of being unable to see, and then being enclosed in fabric walls, transported in a metal lift, and listening to the record, were intended to stir up and leave a variety of sensory memory traces (hence the title of the work, which derives from the Greek word for memory). The installation de-stabilized the way that space is often pictured in art, as something that can be known and ordered by the artist, a sign of his mastery over the world around him. As curator Judith Nesbit argued, Hamilton, by contrast, has created 'a mode of picturing which is much less susceptible to the logic of diagrams. Hers is an invitation to enter an unframed image of the world - a space not of fixity but of fluidity, an unbounded, inverted perceptual field in which sight is no more important than any other sense.' Hamilton has even sought to invade our sense of smell: {kaph) {1998) includes bourbon whisky.
History and society are also addressed in Hamilton's art. She has said 'there is an absence in American culture of the recognition that our democracy began in slavery'. In some works the text of a book is slowly erased by being burnt out line by line, or blotted out with hand-drawn lines of ink: "By removing the mechanically produced text and replacing it with the mark of the body, a space was made that became the trace of the thing that's not in the history told in the book.'33 Hamilton exposes the limits of language, its inability to express experience, and the partiality of the stories it tells. Hamilton is critical of life today in the prosperous West. Her privation and excesses, made as part of the Capp Street Project in San Francisco in 1989, was a room whose floor was covered with 750,000 copper pennies. They spread in great swathes before the viewer, and were soaked in honey, which leeched from their edges. Three sheep looked onto the scene, a lonely figure sat, wringing his hands over a hat filled with honey, and there were two pestles and mortars. The symbolism of the grinding drudgery of work and the miserly hoarding of wealth was offset by the sheer pleasure of the heady scent and luscious look of the piece.
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Samples of Work
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