Much as a poet uses words to suggest the visceral residue of experiences, Ann Hamilton’s art focuses on the intangible—and often intractable—experiential transactions that create memories and impart knowledge. In her large-scale installations, as well as in her intimate sculpture and photographs, Hamilton’s visually economical art gives perceptible form to how the senses know and recall.

Hamilton is best-recognized for her site-generated projects and installations, which cross the boundaries of disciplines and categories of medium. Her use of corporeal materiality and considerable scale produce enveloping, temporal encounters that, at times, include some physical element such as an “attendant” performing a repetitive act. Regardless of scale, Hamilton’s art is at once familiar and slightly disorienting.

The exhibition tracing language is comprised of sculpture, photography, and video. Sculptural works include scripted, 1997—a box holding a length of horsehair and a gold thimble photo-etched with Susan Stewart’s phoenix-like poem Cinder—and slaughter, 1997, which is a glove embroidered with another Stewart poem of the same title.

Three photographic series—body object, 1984/1993; reflection, 2000; and Face to Face, 1999—feature either the artist as subject or the artist as tool holding a camera in her mouth and conflating the action of speaking with seeing in the resultant photographs.

In these and other works, Hamilton creates a frisson of kinesthetic recognition that is reiterated in the two videos in the exhibition—abc, 1994/1999, where a finger erases letters pressed on glass, and lumen, 1995/1996, in which the shadow of a prosthetic hand tries to catch the flickering image of a ring. Fundamentally, the production and reception of language are the acts the artist traces to give form to the transient and sensed connective tissue between.

Ann Hamilton received an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Yale School of Art and is a professor of art at The Ohio State University. Her many awards include: the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1998; a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and an N.E.A. Visual Arts Fellowship in 1993; and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1989. Hamilton represented the United States at both the 48th Venice Biennale in the American Pavilion in 1999, and the 21st International Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, in 1991. A monograph, Ann Hamilton by Joan Simons, was recently published cataloguing the artist’s projects and works since 1983 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2002).

tracing language is presented with support from the Ohio Arts Council and the 2002 Wooster Forum. All works courtesy of the artist and the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

2007 ©The College of Wooster Art Museum
Wooster, OH 44691