Ann Hamilton

at sea, 2012
7905 Herschel Avenue
44' 6" x 44' 6"

at sea……..

this image - of a ship - wind in its sails - is the image of a figure set on the horizon on a course charted for places unknown

it floats isolated in the oceanic - abstracted - untethered - in between home port and eventual destination

isolated, suspended in the moment of crossing from a " here" to a "there"

a still photograph from a journey - is a moment - fixed in the time of its perpetual present

we chart our path, know up from down, land from water, and take our bearings from the horizon - we perceive it as fixed but know by tides, by sun and moon that everything is in motion

similarly - we entrust photographs to fix a moment in time while knowing that memory is remade and turned over by the current moment

an image then - like memory is both a reality and an illusion

like a ship placed into weather - it entrusts to fate what the journey might find

the process of making it was, similarly, an act of finding

like a stylus - a small surveillance camera - an eye - steadied and directed by the hand - moved across the surface of the photograph

its seeing returns time to what was fixed in time - the hand takes the journey the body can not make

just as the boat is suspended in its journey across

so the image holds all the possibilities of being between the period of a pendulum or a swing

it is a suspension which acknowledges the weather but perches in everything that might be

it is a past, a present and a future, a dream and a hope
heading into the storm that gathers on its horizon

- Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton is a contemporary artist best known for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Hamilton was born in 1956 in Lima, Ohio. She received her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of Ohio State University where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art. Hamilton uses common materials as a means of addressing the knowledge that comes from language and touch, creating site-responsive installations for individual and collective experience.

Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, the Heinz Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has exhibited extensively around the world, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hamilton lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann