Sense — Ann Hamilton. Published by Radius Books.
A poetic engagement with decades of her previous work, Ann Hamilton’s hallucinatory book, Sense,
is neither catalogue nor summation but a wholly new artwork.
In Hamilton’s words, this book is filled with “vestiges of projects brought back to the studio,”
reexamined, scanned, creased, rephotographed until the “images became felt things.” And as well
as touch, Sense implies time passing, evanescence, and the evocation of mortality.
Integral to its beauty and meaning, the collaborative design (Ann Hamilton, David Chickey, Nick
Larsen, Kara Gut) breaks open the comfort of narrative and affords an experiential rendezvous with
images whose edges seem to evaporate and pages of concordances, linear columns of words that
offer the nearest hint of fixity and grounding. There is a strange, disquieting equivalency among the
images, and yet on the deepest level that equivalency is a comfort.
This is a magical space that lies somewhere between what was and the transformative reanimation
by both Ann Hamilton the artist and ourselves the readers.
Cheryl Van Hooven is a photographer and writer based in New York and often working in the California Mojave Desert. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, Imagery Estate Winery Permanent Collection at Sonoma State University, among others. Her photographs and writing have been published in Interview magazine, Details magazine, Puchong Folios and Vogue Italia. She is currently working on a photo/text book.