Habitus Ann hamilton
The Fabric Workshop and Museum to unveil an immersive environment and exhibition created by Ann Hamilton
Cloth Making—Among the Oldest Forms of Human Cultural Production—Provides Inspiration for the Renowned Artist’s Multi-Venue Project, habitus
Stained the color of the atmosphere, spinning curtains billow to gigantic proportions; thick rope pulleys rise and fall; whistles sound; a reader reads; and light glints through wooden slits: these stirrings are part of a new large-scale installation by the artist Ann Hamilton that animates a venerable 55,000-foot warehouse along the Delaware River. The occasion is habitus, an exhibition presented by The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) in two locations and in two phases: at Municipal Pier 9, an environment of cloth, sound, and light has opened on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 and remains on view through October 10, 2016; at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, a three-floor installation of domestic and trade-related objects redolent of fabric making has opened on Saturday, September 17, 2016 and remains on view through January 8, 2017.
"habitus is Hamilton's first major exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum. We have collaborated twice before, the last being on her project for the American Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). These installations are surely among the most memorable ever to grow out of our Artist-in-Residence Program and we are thrilled to collaborate on this very ambitious dual-sited exhibition,” says Susan Lubowsky Talbott, interim executive director. "Ultimately, habitus continues Hamilton's ongoing practice, one that connects "text" to "textile" through their shared root in language and in the physical nature of reading and sewing as the eye and hand move across a plane. Both activities are immersive and also intimate,” Talbott concludes. Hamilton elaborates, "Cloth is the body’s first architecture; it protects, conceals, and reveals; it carries a body’s weight, swaddles at birth, covers in sleep and in death. When we speak of its qualities, we speak of a cloth’s hand: we know it through touch. Its felt experience is evoked and described by the other hand that we always inhabit, that of language."
Ann Hamilton • habitus • 2016. Installation at Municipal Pier 9, made in collaboration with The
Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson.