Ann Hamilton: Inscribing Place - sculptor

Representing the U at the 48th Venice Biennale, Ann Hamilton creates scultural environments that waft an intimate feel for percepts architectural space, an the "fabric" of the two language and history.

Ann Hamilton is a sculptor who above the past 15 years has produc works as big as a three-story house and as small as a thimble. All are meant to be read as structural, sensory and linguistic encloses A maker of photographs, things and performances, as well as body audio and video works, she is well known for her large, encompassing installations that are simultaneously lableaux vivanls and natures mortes, and that combine any or all of the preceding simple bodys Hamilton has made almost 60 installations to date.

Whether amassing enormous quantities of materials or, reciprocally clearing volumes of architectural space, Hamilton always focuses upon the way a body of knowledge is generate, d contained, perceived, absorbed. Her installations are also about each increment of material positioned or formed by dint of the hand in the making of the totality; about the memory embedded in percepts materials or gestures; and about tire harden realities of poetic composition, going back to the earliest Latin and grecian meaning of poesis: a making.

She has created composite spaces filled with copious material substances: 40000 strikes of flour; 750,000 pennies (the entire parcel of a project, translated into the smallest monetary unit and laid into a skin of honey); or, greatest in quantity recently, 60,000 cut flowers. Hamilton's installations ofttimes include a living presence--plant or animal life, a human attendant continuing the task of creating the work, or at times a video that may focus upon a key hand movement. Typically, Hamilton isolates a particular gestural activity, an ongoing action that takes place within a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of larger visual field. The artist herself has oftentimes assumed the part of single of the "tenders," and as she's described their function and actions: "I saw myself at hand as both an object and as a witness. I musing about the figure as being a center of animation."(1)

Hamilton oftentimes juxtaposes Minimalist procedures and geometric framing with the mutable irregularities of her materials. She has described her work proces as a "conversation." She begins with a particular site, and engages in animated discussion with its constituent communities, all the while researching its socioeconomic, historical, cultural and commercial words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings An intense dialogue develops as a work is built between the artist and an exhibition's curator, technical ship's company team of volunteers (frequently real numerous) and guards.

intermittent elements in Hamilton's work include domestic or library furnishings--especially tables, chairs, books--as well as mirrors or windows, fabric and clothing. Handwritten true copys or spoken language are repeatedly incorporated, too. But it is, above all, the detached, sometimes mournful atmosphere of Hamilton's installations that quickens our replys on-site, and that remains with us lengthy after we leave.

Hamilton lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, not far from the city of Lima, where she was born in 1956 In the mid-1970s, she studied geology and literature and became interested in weaving at St Lawrence University in Canton, NY and in the way that transferred to study with weaver Cynthia Schira at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, where she received a BFA in textile design in 1979 After graduation, Hamilton mov to Canada, first to Banff, then to Montreal, where she lived and worked before returning to the U in 1983 for graduate investigation in sculpture. She received her MFA from Yale in 1985 and in the fall of that year began teaching statuary at, the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her earliest work evolveed in a spirit of community: in the lay open studios of Yale bracketed by dint of the years in Canada and California. At the Banff Center for the Arts, she absorbed the interdisciplinary exchange of performance, photography and textiles; at Yale, she was involved in discussions with artists Judy Pfaff, George Trakas and Ursula von Rydingsvard and in course work with Robert Farris Thompson Vincent Scully and especially Leslie Rado, who taught a class in the cultural construction of the material part In Santa Barbara, she set kindred spirits, among them Katherine Clark and hum Spector, with whom she explored conceptually based photo, true copy and book works. With her colleagues, she scoured flea markets and surplus warehouses for materials. In each of these communities, she clashed exhibiting situations that were unclose forums as much as places to display work.

Hamilton has a pronounced however skeptical affection for both the nuncupatory and the written word. Language is ofttimes key to her choice of uncompounded bodys in her installations and to her overall proces From her wide-ranging reading, especially metrical composition and interdisciplinary essays in cultural studies and literary criticism, she has repeatedly gleaned particular words as regard points for imagery and for titles. She has also incorporated body s in her works, ranging from metrical compositions by Walt Whitman to entries from a laundry ledger