Just a note,

obviously my sentences are lacking in structure and have no grammar and trail off or never finish or pop up in the middle of things BUT this is just a working space for me, not something highly polished :)

Friday, March 6, 2009

Ann Hamilton TRON

"You have to trust the things you can't name"
"you feel through your body, you take in the world through your skin."


Hamilton explores communication and sensory perception, and believes experience leads to knowledge, the way your senses interact with the world around you to form your opinions, your phenomenologicalexperience of the world around you. Hamilton is interested in the relationship between animals and humans, in her 1996 exhibition 'voce' visitors were invited to wear headsets that played birdsong and mimic what they heard. Birdsong is impossible to perfectly imitate using your own voice making the human version inadequate and longing for a perfection that they can never achieve without external aid.

Tropos uses bundles of horse hair to cover the entire floor of the room. Horse hair is still used in the production of wigs so has associations with both animals and humans. You are drawn to it because of its human resemblence but repelled with associations of animal cruelty and exploitation, and question the ethical treatment of the horses whose hair is used in the exhibition. The sheer amount of hair used and it's placement in an industrial building speaks about the mass scale on which animals are alughtered and used for our purposes and commoditised. Her work really brings to attention the the mass sacrifice of animals for human aesthetics, which is something I want to concentrate on within my own work.

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