ANN HAMILTON
you’re invited
ANDREA BLANCH: I wanted to ask you about your
portraits at the ADAA Fair. How did you come to
that technique?
ANN HAMILTON: The year after I had done a very
large project at the Armory, called “The Event of the
Thread,” Carl Solway, a gallerist in Cincinnati, asked
me if I would do a booth with him at the ADAA Fair,
which was a totally different context and scale than
the Armory. I had begun to develop this project a few
years earlier and it has an interesting history. It began
with a collaboration between Warhol Museum
and businesses in Pittsburgh called ‘Factory Direct,’
which joined artists with different companies, manufacturers,
and businesses.
I was paired with their material scientist. I was interested
in the fact that so much of what they do involves
engineering the performance of surfaces; how
the tactile interface of the phone works, or how the
raincoat you’re wearing sheathes water. One of the
researchers put this material called DuraFlex pectin
into my hand, a cross between rubber and cloth that is
used to hold large volumes of liquid under pressure.
It’s tough, but very flexible and thin. When he put
it into my hands, I could immediately see my hand
through it. When something touches it, that part is in
focus and everything else is out of focus. That shallow
depth of field was a way to think about making
the actual contact of touch visible.
I was thinking that what’s really interesting about their
manufacturing is that so much of it is invisible, in a city
like Pittsburgh where the steel industry has been such
a mark on the landscape. I went out to the Bayer campus
and worked with their researchers and asked them
to hold up something from their research or something
they produced to the surface. It was quite fantastic. In
the process, I was looking at how people look through
it, and I casually started taking people’s portraits. We
didn’t take it much further for a while. When Carl Solway
asked me to do this, I was thinking about how it
brought forward aspects of the large installation project
at the Armory in a different form.
One of the relationships that structured the Armory
project was this quality of near and far. You might
be at a distance from the person on the swing at
the other side of the cloth, but you’re actually connected
via ropes and pulleys to each other and you
could – depending on how it was working – feel the
weight of someone at a distance. I was thinking about
intimacy in a public space and about how we’re connected
across distance. I thought it would be great to
do something at an art fair, which is obviously very
much about the market. One of the structures we put
in place for the project was that everyone who was
photographed received an ephemera image of someone
else who had been photographed. If you were
interested, you could buy your portrait. The majority
of them went out as pieces that circulated in the mail.
Again, near and far is connected in that sort of structure.
A letter is passed by hand and it still comes into
your hand. That’s the full circle.
ANDREA: Soon after graduate school you made
that fabulous porcupine suit. How do you feel about
Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits”? Do you feel that you preempted
that work?
ANN: I love his work and think he’s taken it to an incredible
place. But they come from different influences.
The history of encrusting oneself is so old. It’s so
much older than the contemporary art world. I think
all of us are participating in what happens when you
Portrait by Michael Mercil.
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