Ann Hamilton (artist)
After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983.
[5] Though Hamilton studied textile design throughout her undergraduate career, she pointedly decided to focus on sculpture instead of weaving as a concentration in graduate school.
[9] Hamilton's installations are meant to be experienced with all the senses, often incorporating elements like sound and smell that urge the viewer to connect with and engage the work on a multi-sensory level.
The artist used $7,500 worth of pennies to cover a large portion of the gallery floor stuck to the surface by a thin coating of honey.
[12] The first was in the museum's street-side window-display space, whose back and side walls were covered with block-printed texts, using shoe polish as ink.
[12] On a tall stool, under a broken strand of nichrome wire, a felt hat sat upended covered in beeswax and graphite.
[12] The inner walls of the enclosed space were covered with small pieces of faded newsprint with handwritten memories, each attached with a single tack, constantly rustling from a fan affixed above the doorway.
[12] In the center of the room stood a vitrine made of steel and glass, inside which there were two cabbages, reminiscent of cerebral hemispheres, being devoured by a colony of snails.
[13] She created the piece as a commissioned work as a part of the Places with a Past exhibition within the Spoleto Festival, in which artists chose a site and responded to both the historical and current context of the city.
[7] The back wall held the hanging bags of soybeans that slowly spilled and began to sprout from the humid air within the space, calling attention to the atmosphere of South Carolina.
[13] The title of the exhibition, as well as the incorporation of blue objects, likewise referenced Charleston's history and indigo's economic significance as a plant and dye in the city.
For the art piece, Hamilton covered the entire warehouse floor with varying colored interwoven horse hair.
[6][18] To create the video, Hamilton used a small surveillance camera positioned very near a black-and-white photograph of her son, over which she moved her hand in a continuous, slow motion.
Because of the camera's position, the small lens, and the movement of her hand, which she calls "hand-seeing," the image in the video is often abstract and out of focus, a blur of mouths and noses.
The artist's installation reflected her interests in humanity, language, text, and physical material[20] and referenced the movement and transmission of cultural information and identity through the use of books and a manual mechanism of travel.
[25] Cortlandt Street subway station project The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts and Design Program commissioned Hamilton to create an art project as a part of the reconstruction of Manhattan's Cortlandt Street subway station that was destroyed on September 11, 2001.
Hamilton feels as if this relates to the medical field in always waiting for answers, check ups, and having a semi blinded sense of what is going on and just relying on a voice, no physical person.
