Untitled

Ann Hamilton is an established contemporary artist best known for her large-scale installations that combine spoken and written word with sculpture, textiles, audio, and video. Her intention is for viewers to be active participants and to engage all their senses when experiencing her artwork. This untitled work is composed of pages removed from a book upon which she placed small pebbles, obscuring the lines of text. It is one of a number created at the time in which Hamilton explored reading and writing as acts of erasure, the act of reading as absorption, and unseen labor. Hamilton began incorporating books with text that she had obscured or obliterated in her 1991 installation “Indigo Blue,” which incorporated an attendant who sat and erased the text from pages of an old military manual. This multiple continued Hamilton’s interrogation of the relationship between the abstraction of language and the materiality of books. The edition was originally sold to benefit the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. For the edition, Hamilton selected 54 found volumes (40 for the edition, plus 14 artist proofs, of which this is one) chosen for their physical nature and typographic design. Each volume is positioned open with six to eight pages cut from the original volume and reattached edge to edge adjacent to the open book.