Allison Janae Hamilton September 3, 2022 – February 5, 2023
Allison Janae Hamilton was born in Kentucky and grew up in Florida; her maternal family’s farmland is in western Tennessee.
She uses her intimate knowledge of southern land to examine relationships between life and landscape. Her film and photography look to the folklore, rituals and traditions of communities that have long faced land loss, pollu- tion and other forms of environmental displacement. Hamilton’s works often include spectral figures to convey the role of nature in Black experience as beautiful and fragile, hopeful and haunted. “A Pale Horse” is both meditative and slightly disturbing as buzzing flies disrupt the serenity of rippling water. In these tensions we find connections to con - temporary life. Storms and floodwaters increasingly ravage this region of abundant natural beauty. Her dreamlike “Floridawater” photographs show Hamilton’s body submerged in the murky waterways of North Florida. In the nineteenth century, enslaved labor excavated this canal to carry cotton from Georgia through the Florida Panhandle to ships in the Gulf of Mexico. Young girls in “Wakulla Cathedral” wander through a sabal palm tree forest, re-grounding our relationship with the trees that have become so iconic to Florida’s organized landscapes and tourism industry. These bodies clad in white garments suggest another way of being with the land: as respite, ref- uge and hiding place.
(top) Allison Janae Hamilton (American, b. 1984), “Floridawater I,” 2019. Archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Allison Janae Hamilton. (bottom) Allison Janae Hamilton (American, b. 1984), still from “Wakulla Cathedral,” 2019. Single-channel video on monitor (8mm film), total runtime 3:25 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Allison Janae Hamilton.
Curator: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art
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