Graham Hamilton

September 1, 2018

Hi scott, Hiiii. Heijjjj! Telephone call. Postcard, email, letter. Modes of address. Forms of communication. Paintings and photographs are two types of indexes. The best definition of an index I’ve heard?: A shadow of the thing. Paintings are like a shadow of the artist, of his presence, of the xchange. They pack all that time of making and experience into the material. Painting's liveliness is what is so compelling about it, this illusion of vital presence, but their time is past time. With paper collage though, the material is always present tense. These paper flowers describe the moment of their making, the folding and circular cutting, but they don’t embody it. The walls they are mounted on, however, are indexes in a way; scuffed and touched and painted, they chart, mark, witness the passing of creative time and through their excision from the architectural structure they become paintings. But the plexi box freezes the whole thing, the present of the paper, the past of the wall, and by making these objects artifacts it casts them into the future. The artifact is kind of always waiting to be observed. And the actual looking and reflection - looking at and through could be a moment out of time, escaped, refracted at an angle, away from the embattled present always stuck in a struggle between past and future. There are at least two people in this show, intimate relationships reflected in the closing, to see something really clearly, to understand it fully, it has to end. Box it up, move away, look back at it.

text by Graham Hamilton
opening 3 - 8
performance/party downstairs at 9

PDF below:
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