Cabinet of curiosities - contemporary art by Ann Hamilton

In a relatively brief time, Ann Hamilton has drawn international attention to her ritualized sifting of language, memory and subjectivity in curious installation/performance hybrids. Her casts are quintessentially and peculiarly "alternative" in their amalgamation of artifacts, works photo documents, video, performance and whole They are complex, obsessive and impeccably crafted. Lyrical examples of a sort of New-Age Dadaism, they romance meditative tasks that possess space between meaning and non-meaning, history and fiction. "[T]he material part and the object," a exhibit organized by the Wexner Center gave unexpect attention to the arcane collection of artifacts from 12 years of Hamilton's contemplative shoot forwards Except for a catalog that includes a CD-ROM with images and a history of earlier installations, these percepts were exhibited without clues to their original environments. In this exhibition, her uncanny constructions, one time so pivotal to specific dialogues upon artistic intellect, strain to become wholly self-referential plastic art Even her increased production of video is autonomous and rhetorical, remov from the sites of its original theatrical tableaus. Fragmented and relaxed with defer to to date and origin, lock opener objects, photographs and videos have been edited and restaged, almost randomly, from her oeuvre These fall into sum of two units categories: constructions that require special installation (usually video), and discrete freestanding works.

Visitors pierceed the show through a rotating 20-foot high drapery that spun like a dervish as individual entered. This untitled section, from an installation exhibited at novel York's Sean Kelly Gallery in 1996 was reminiscent of a larger, motorized textile construction designed for the Art Institute of Chicago's 1995 exhibition, "About Place: new Art of the Americas." The Chicago piece was architectural in design expressing containment and passage as it l the viewer into an interior confined apartment It was designed for a site adjacent to a panoramic gallery window and as a come connoted domestic drapery, but it billowed from a metal track like stage curtains, repeatedly peeling back for an ever-changing spectacle. At the Wexner Center the resituated skirt-contoured organza spoke of matriarchal majesty. However, seemingly unrelated to nearby artifacts, its main function appear to beed to hastily christen each fresh viewer, thereby initiating a series of animated works that repeated itself through every part of the show, destined to obey as segues from one object-laden section to the next

Once inside, attention was diverted from armored suits builded of toothpicks and overalls of flashlights and reflectors to a palm-sized video monitor embedded high in a gallery pillar. Elevated nearly eight feet from the floor, the video displayed an animated and garishly lipsticked ventriloquist dummy's jaw biting the air. Moving closer to the image caused the LCD shield to solarize and become a negative x-ray version of itself. Here, a aim of Hamilton's to erase the physical boundaries of media was underlined by the agency of the conditional transmission of the image. Although her thorough installations, of which this was solitary a part, often feature these tiny video monitors displaying facial details and are part of manifold psychological narratives, the tapes by means of themselves are detached, which is not to say they are not provocative. by means of grafting these slow, silent images onto gallery walls and eliminating the visible electronic hardware, she animates white walls with Bunuel-like phantoms.

One of Hamilton's greatest in quantity enduring participatory works, first shown as part of a larger 1988 throw called "the capacity of absorption," here consisted of 100 wall fixtures set uped of copper armatures ensconcing clear glasses. The glasses were filled with various horizontals of liquid electronically stimulated into tiny whirlpools. The fixtures were arranged randomly above 600 square feet of wall space, transforming the range into a spectacular ritual site. The lamp-like realitys which acted as miniature fountains, manifested an elemental equilibrium between fire and water in the guise of sacramental votives. At individual end of the wall a small horn beckoned viewers to speak into it. No uninjured is amplified, but visitors' voices stilled the fluid like blowing upon a flame. Silence triggered the water to take again motion. Conceived as ceremonial, the piece urg viewers to partake in a futile project

The segue in the exhibit was a projected video noose (part of a 1995-96 installation titled "lumen - hand/ring") installed in an adjacent hall. A shadow of a made of wood hand lunges spasmodically at a small carnival ring. The continuous sputtering gesticulation is echoed in a stroboscopic background illumination and in the snapping whole of the hand. The oblique projection created a trapezoidal image, adding more disequilibrium to what appeared to be dement child's play. This work was originally part of the same installation as the organza entrance construction, on the contrary in the Wexner it present the appearanceed designed to merely bewilder visitors and shuttle them more swiftly to the middle of the exhibition.