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Ann Hamilton at Sean Kelly - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2002 by Jonathan Gilmore

In the cavernous space of Ann Hamilton's installation at hand (2001), each of six vacuum contraptions affixed to the ceiling periodically hovered over a stack of paper, lifted a single sheet and then let it drop to the floor. Accompanying the rhythmic whoosh, whirr and suction sounds of the machines and the gentle rustling of paper was a woman's voice intoning a series of actions: "a hand remembers, a hand betrays, a voice offers, a hand slackens, a mouth lies, a voice brightens." The translucent paper dipped and rolled in otherwise imperceptible air currents before coming to rest in ever-growing piles of what looked like insubstantial, oversized ivory-colored soap flakes. Walking among these accumulations, one could see that the edges of each sheet had been painted red. Viewed from above through several layers of paper, the crisscrossing edges seemed like fields of facets drawn in light pencil.

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Although more restrained in its construction and impact than Hamilton's other recent installations, this work continues her investigations into the corporeal, aural and visual relationships one has with architecture, and the disjunction between immediate experience and its verbal articulation. The falling paper and the installation's spectacle of its own automated production suggest a kind of communication that is public and preserved, where what is said and done becomes sedimented as part of the historical record, present--if obscured--by the volume of what has been archived. The ambient invocation of the actions performed by the hand and voice imply another kind of communication: intimate and lost in the instant of its occurrence.

Elsewhere, Hamilton showed 39 small black-and-white photographs from the ongoing series "Face to Face," all taken with a pinhole camera held in her mouth, which she opens to expose the film. (Hamilton explored a similar process in a theatrical collaboration with Meredith Monk. A miniature live-feed video camera secured to Monk's teeth showed an audience what her singing mouth "saw.") Hamilton's parted lips serve as the photographs' borders, which have a parabolic contour. This generates the sense that one is seeing, as if in reverse voyeurism, through someone else's eyes. In counterpoint, monitors alongside the photographs played two videos, both called the picture is still (2001), created using a tiny finger-mounted camera that traces the faces in news photographs to suggest a form of visual caress.

The photos largely show people's faces as they watch Hamilton--with suspicion, curiosity or irritation--during the lengthy exposure time the odd device requires. It is as if the eye's vision had been given to the mouth, each organ's form of desire conjoined with the other's, and the consuming function of the mouth given a greater, perceptual reach. This resonated meaningfully with Hamilton's film of a shadow play (shown in another room and created with a zoetrope from an earlier installation), in which a figure using a mechanical arm awkwardly clutches at a hanging ring in an effort to extend her natural grasp.

[These works are currently featured in the solo exhibition "at hand" at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Mar. 26-July 14.]

Ann Hamilton at Sean Kelly - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2002 by Jonathan Gilmore

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