Ann Hamilton Book

Temporary installations are ubiquitous in art spaces today, but there is one artist whose mysterious and sensual room-sized works unsettle even the jaded viewer. In Ann Hamilton, art writer and independent curator Joan Simon offers an intensive guided tour of nearly two decades of projects that now exist only in the 300 evocative photographs that illustrate this book. Simon lucidly discusses Hamilton's explorations of time, language, and memory, beginning with the early pieces involving massive quantities of unlikely objects (a floor carpeted with thousands of pennies stuck in honey; a table covered with 14,000 human and animal teeth embedded in iron oxide) to the "slow emptying" of recent work in photography, video, and performance. While no book can re-create the complex of sounds, smells, and actions that make Hamilton's art so compelling, Simon helps those who have experienced some of the artist's works to understand their connection to the realm of ideas. --Cathy Curtis Read More