 |   | |
Arches and Seizures
7-31 October 2009
Alex Hamilton releases Arches and Seizures (words from the Fourth Amendment) a poster size facsimile printed on archival paper, folded and presented as an artist’s book.
Arches and Seizures exclusively at KALEID as a signed edition of fifty-two, £25 each.
Hamilton will also exhibit three pieces from the Crossroad series, the original Wave Drawing with Star Shape (American Flag series) and a new video piece, a crystalline trumpet made out of ice and played by the artist for Arches and Seizures
The Fourth Amendment was originally conceived to protect smugglers and other outlaws from the British. Keeping the original tone of "sound", Hamilton's reading of the Fourth Amendment stretches the vocabulary to a near liminal state, somewhere betwee an intended reading and no meaning at all. Spaces of blanked out words and letters in the artist's book generate a new rhythm and a new tone as they are vocalised in the ice trumpet film. Hamilton's deadpan sincerity portrays a man struggling with his own auto-destructive creation. A crystalline ice form, frozen around a mould that is later removed, to be used as a functioning instrument. This struggle mirrors the Crossroad series, an extended space transformed and mutated by the eddying wave of nature's elements.
Victoria Browne
“For Hamilton, reading words, reading images, and reading space are not distinct activities- they are inextricably (and revealingly) intertwined.” Jonathan Griffin.
Wave Drawing with Star Shape (American Flag Series) Pit Pen (light fast ink), graphite pencil on archival paper 2006
Arches and Seizures (words from the Fourth Amendment) Artist’s Book, fascimile on archival paper
Signed edition of fifty-two 2009, £25
Arches and Seizures (words from the Fourth Amendment) 5’32 minute film 2009
Crossroads 10 Pen and ink, charcoal pencil, watercolour, gouache, airbrush on photocopy paper 2009 Office Block with Crossroads 2 Pen and ink, charcoal pencil, watercolour, gouache, airbrush on photocopy paper 2009
Crossroads 7 Pen and ink, charcoal pencil, watercolour, gouache, airbrush on photocopy paper 2009 Spickes Artist’s Book, fascimile on archival paperSigned edition of twenty-five 2009, £25
Photography Alessandra Chilá
FLASH Review Redchurch Idler
Amending the 4th amendment alters the constitution in one fell swoop,
leaving a junk document to provide
a halting lexical experience, viz
Arches & Seizures, a fragmentary
sous-texte that evokes dropped-off
shop signage on Main Street, set against
a background of swirling calligraphic
lines, a black & white banner to go
with the convulsive bop phrasings
of Alex Hamilton in ice trumpeter
video mode, his woolly-gloved jazz lampoon
of State pageantry and grandiloquence
also an autodestructive take on polar
meltdown, glottal buglings that
dissipate meaning, handiwork
inducing confusion & paralysis
in the flag-waving masses.
