Ann Hamilton

She attended St. Lawrence University from 1974–1976; University of Kansas, BFA in Textile Design, 1979; Yale School of Art, MFA in Sculpture, 1985.

Currently she resides in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband Michael Mercil, also an artist.

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.

She claims that, when making that decision, she was “interested in the relationships between things in space.

And more important than the things themselves is the way they come into relation.” While in Canada, and while teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Hamilton began creating an interdisciplinary art with textiles "weaved" with photography and performance; often resulting in different elements combined in an image or includes textiles like pressed shirts or work uniforms.

In addition to her educational background.

She identifies herself as a reader: of space, of objects, of literary criticism, of poetry, and even of dictionaries; thus, the act of reading, words, and books often make their way into her installations, videos, and created objects.

Her work also explores themes of humanity, from gender and the body to suffering and power.

As a conceptual artist working with video, sound, and interactive installation, the elements of time, change, and decay also play roles in her work.

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.

Her works also often respond to the spaces and cities in which they are created, using objects that reflect the history and identity of the culture.

suitably positioned

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.

Ann Hamilton is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations.

One of Hamilton's first installations, suitably positioned, 1984, set the tone for her later works, encompassing many of her artistic methods: installation, object-making, photography, and performance.

For this piece, she constructed a suit made of a men's thrift-store suit and toothpicks.

She then stood, wearing the suit, for the duration of the installation within the studio with viewers walking around the artist without interacting with her.

The suit was originally made as a part of a work titled room in search of a position, which, after exhibition, Hamilton believed didn't reach pictorial success and decided to rethink her use of these made objects.

However, Hamilton later incorporated the toothpick suit into an installation titled suitably positioned, which finally created a connection between the object, a suit, and the figure, herself within the suit.

This installation was directly associated with her body object series.

body object series

While working on suitably positioned, Hamilton began to think about her subject matter differently, hoping to create an installation that "demonstrates a relation instead of making a picture of a relation."

This thinking led Hamilton to begin creating her body object series, a collection of photographs first produced in 1984 with further editions produced in 1987, 1994, and 2006.

Working with photographer Bob McMurtry on the series, Hamilton shot photographs of herself wearing constructed objects like her toothpick suit.

The coverings of the body in these photographs represent what Hamilton calls, "the articulation of the self at the boundaries of the body."

privation and excesses

From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

In San Francisco, Hamilton exhibited privation and excesses as a part of the Capp Street Project in 1989.

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.

In a chair on the edge of the field of honey and pennies, a figure (sometimes the artist herself) sat, wringing their hands in a hat full of honey.

palimpsest

In collaboration with Kathryn Clark, the palimpsest installation was part of a group exhibition at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, "Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos" in 1989.

The installation was organized into two zones, one that demonstrated memory lost and the other memory experienced.

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.

On a tall stool, under a broken strand of nichrome wire, a felt hat sat upended covered in beeswax and graphite.

The second part of the installation was a room that visitors could enter, filled with the scent of beeswax and the sound of paper fluttering.

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.

Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University.

She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.

Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio.