Ann Hamilton | Figuring Luck
October 3 - November 2, 2024
First Thursday reception: October 3, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Figuring Luck, an exhibition of recent works by Ann Hamilton. This new series of porcelain enamel portraits, produced with vintage scanning tools, expands upon the body of Hamilton’s ongoing work with alternative photographic modes of capture.
The subjects of Hamilton’s Figuring Luck are the roughly rendered forms of the ‘Fève’, miniature hand-painted ceramic figures traditionally baked into king’s cake for the Epiphany holiday. For the person who finds the figure in their cake, it signals luck and prosperity, and in some traditions, they are crowned queen or king for the day. While the literal translation of ‘fève’ is ‘bean’, the tradition has taken many forms, from the use of beans, to plastic king’s cake babies, to what Hamilton has captured in the portraits of Figuring Luck. The title takes its inspiration from this history, however, what interests Hamilton in the magnification of these inch-high sculptures is the expressive quality of these minimally articulated figures, scanned and cropped in conventional portrait proportions.
This is the latest series within the larger body of Hamilton’s image work using the vintage flatbed scanner as a photographic tool. The shallow depth of field produced by the scan creates an atmosphere pronouncing the voluminous character of the objects as shadow and blur, while simultaneously bringing into sharp focus the points at which the figure touches the glass. This dynamic shifting, between soft and hard lines, between light and shadow, is replicated in the shift between miniature and gigantic, as theses figures, who once began as small cartoonish abstractions, are now rendered as nearly human-scale, bringing with them all that is minimally necessary to form the recognition of a figure: the hint of an eye or an arm, a grin or a frown, and perhaps to suggest an emotion of contentment or melancholy. Hamilton turns her interest in the relation between the animate and the inanimate, the miniature and the gigantic, toward figuring the figure itself.
A related work of gigantic puppet-like figures will open in the Winter of 2024/25 as part of Seattle’s Public Art Program.
Ann Hamilton is internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, performance collaborations, print media, and public projects—most notably the 2017 project for the MTA subway at the World Trade Center. Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal for the Arts, the MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Hamilton represented the United States in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world, including a museum-wide installation at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) in 2015 and 1992. Her work is included in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, OH), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), among many others.