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.
ANDREA: I’m thinking about your work at the Armory.
I hadn’t noticed the birds until later. Can you
tell me more about them?
ANN: They’re homing pigeons, so they can always go
home. That project started from me thinking of that
space, the Park Avenue Armory, as a civic space. I
started thinking in my associational path that I want
to do something about the intimacy of reading New
York City. Maybe one way to read the city is through
the animals that have no weight and can occupy the
air, traveling from here to there, which is actually
how we think. So, they were read to everyday from
concordant scrolls, and at the end of the day, they
were released, and would fly to a cage where they
ate and spent the night. There was a moment when
they were free and suspended. The birds stand in for
us. We use language to cross a space to communicate
with another person, but that does not work with another
species. How do we acknowledge another presence
and communicate with it in another form? It’s
about what we can say and it’s also about what we
can’t say, or we can’t know. Sometimes the most compelling
things to us are things we can never explain,
and the piece is about trying to make a space for that.
People stayed for a really long time; they lay under
the cloth and took naps. It became a sort of an indoor
park. To have an opportunity to work in a space like
that, which is really different than a museum or an art
gallery, was incredibly thrilling.
would work with that digital, really low-resolution
file and make prints. You can look at a historic photograph
of a crowd where the figures are incredibly
tiny, and this little camera finds these gestures and
moments that you wouldn’t see otherwise. It’s almost
like you’re caressing the photograph. I have thought
about it in terms of the act of seeing and the act of
touch. It was the same as putting the mechanism of
sight in my mouth. It is still a process that I use. I’m
working with early generation scanners that most
people have thrown away. What I like about them is
that they’re so imperfect. They have a really shallow
depth of field, so they register contact. What’s interesting
about working in this time is that the images
that are made are a consequence of the crossing of
analog and digital technologies. They’re all shifting
very quickly and won’t be there in ten years.
ANDREA: What did you use for your 2005 print stills?
ANN: Those are made using that camera, but I’m
actually looking at little tiny wooden sculptures in
a history museum in Stockholm. They have all these
carved panels from the churches around Sweden that
have been collected in their medieval halls. These
carved objects tell the story of the Bible. They are
something that those people – who might not have
been able to read at the time – can recognize. I became
really interested in this and used my little camera to
animate and coax these things to life. That sounds really
corny. I took it as an act of ventriloquism. Again,
it’s a relationship of near and far. As I put my camera
near the carved opened mouths of one of the figures
and then far away, it starts to reanimate. So, it returns
this thing that is frozen in time to motion. That interest
in live time, and motion, underlies many of my
processes. From that, these stills are found. You could
never intentionally compose those frames.
ANDREA: I’d like to talk a little bit about the Cortlandt
Street Station. When do you think that will
be finished?
ANDREA: Do you do any post-production work? Do
you use Photoshop or anything digital in your work?
ANN: A lot. About a decade ago, I started working
with a very tiny surveillance camera that also had
a shallow focus, very much like the pectin membrane
material. I attached this little camera to my
fingers and would look at something that was fixed,
like a photograph, and animate it by the motion of
my hand, and it would become dimensional. Then I
ANN: I can’t exactly say the opening dates, but it’s
about a two and a half, three-year project. I’m in the
middle of it right now.
ANDREA: What was your thought process on that?
ANN: The project continues the work I’ve done with
texts that emerge from fields of materials. When I
made the proposal for Cortlandt Station, I was thinking
about an aspirational language; about how the
Ann Hamilton. Oneeveryone - Cynthia, 2015. Courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio and Carl Solway Gallery.
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