From Our Archives: Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton. Oneeveryone - Cynthia, 2015. Courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio and Carl Solway Gallery.
Andrea Blanch: What is the connection between your large-scale work and your more intimate photography?
Ann Hamilton: The work has always gone back-and-forth between the very small and close at hand, and the volumetric and very large. The pinhole work became interesting because I thought of the cavity of the mouth as a space, not a thing. Is there some analogue between the cavity of the mouth and architecture? What if the orifice through which verbal language exits becomes an orifice of sight? My work comes from these simple questions. It’s a very associative path. You’re in a process, and you’re finding your questions, and you’re finding your form, and you’re finding a way your form addresses your questions. When I first took those photos, what was really interesting to me was that the apparatus, the mechanism of the camera, is no longer between myself and another person. It’s more of standing face-to-face in a way that’s really vulnerable. You’re never supposed to stand in public with your mouth open, right? I thought about it being a record of that moment, that time of standing face-to-face and the act of recognition that passes in that time.
The other thing about it that’s important to mention is that I had a plastic container and little film canisters that were made into pinhole cameras that could sit in my mouth. It was something I could travel with, and a way for me to be present with people in different circumstances, to work in a way that wasn’t always dependent on a giant project in a big architectural space. It would be something I would do on the side while working on a big project. It was like sketching.
Ann Hamilton. Face to Face - 65, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.
Ann Hamilton. Face to Face - 28, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.
Andrea: Robert Storr has said in reference to your work, “It makes you feel with the senses and with the mind.” Do you think about how your viewers will respond to your work and what you would like them to take away? Is it a visceral feeling?
Ann: Everyone’s experience is individual and full of different kinds of information. There’s the information we take in through all of our senses and there’s the information that comes in through the written word, through spoken word, and through sound. It’s the ways in which those material elements and phenomena intersect in you that becomes the piece. There isn’t some narrative to get. The work is very physically concrete and on the other hand, its relationships are relational and abstract. They’re about the felt quality of things. We understand things through our experience, in ways we don’t always know how to trust. We have many brains. What I hope is that people will slow down enough and spend time amid the pieces, and that their relations are evocative enough that they carry away an experience that’s really of them. It might be provoked in relationship to the piece. People have asked me, “Am I supposed to get all the links between all these things?” I would say you get them, but you might not get them in an analytical way. Your body gets them.
For the full version of Ann Hamilton’s interview, check out Issue No. 13 - WOMEN.
