Alex Hamilton
Things Which Shorten Tedious Days From A Tedious Eye Break Down The I Before We Discover How To Burn Down The Sun Acrylic ink, pastel, vanish fixative collage, on canvas 150 cm x 225 cm 2021
Click on image to read the review of the show
Carbon Monoxide Scape Apple HQ Federation Square Melbourne 5 Acrilic inks pastel acrilic varnish erased photocopy on watercolour paper 87.5 x 117.8 cm
I built a road which had no purpose.
I'm interested in the structures of meeting and gathering places such as Federation Square Melbourne, where discussions can occur unruly or otherwise.
In the Carbon Monoxide Apple HQ Federation Square series I reorganize spaces, erasing and drawing over a printed out architect's illustration. I use drawing styles ranging from the diagrammatic used to convey knowledge e.g. from architects illustrations to geography, to the more self referential world-view of caricatures. Erasure implies ways of forgetting and remembering content, which doesn’t necessarily need recording by camera, memory or direct observation.
Be it drawn water surfaces, sections of sky, or shadows, my work starts, for myself and viewer, with various blank areas seen adjacent to their surroundings, similar to blank sea areas of global maps, defined by designated land areas. Geography was once horizontal scenographic conceptions of earth’s surface. Nowadays any geographic space can be tracked to any other as an amorphous ever changing 3D conception. My interest in architecture ranges from municipal facards almost as public contracts, to the inherited or copied suburban architecture modified by successive generations, to the outer shells of car design forming crumpled continuities of traffic on road surfaces. Our colonisation of stratosphere and subterranean planet, fuels my formal interest in indeterminate post grid dynamic spaces between fragmentary horizon lines. Memory and sensation are uncertain, instead we rely on and maintain certain alternate realities proving the reality of events.
Playing with parameters of abstraction, architecture, landscape, scale, and figuration I'm conscious of forces such as migration, capitalism, and climate change impacting lived experience. My work speaks of a blurring of symbolic and material boundaries.
How to Make a Trumpet Out of Ice. @ Testing Grounds Melbourne, 23rd of May to 8th of June 2019
video
Short version
Longer version
Click on image "Koch Fountain Met Manhattan 1" to see a short film of the drawing and book exhibition
“The Weird Wiles of Reprehensible’s Pensibles"
Alex Hamilton @ Pablo’s Birthday New York 26th of November 2017 to the 7th of January 2018
My core activity is drawing significant urban, rural and metropolitan sites. Photocopying on paper, I enlarge photos I take, using erasure as part of redrawing and re-planning the site.
Just as a drip or pour of paint announces a painting, so at first glance my style of drawing has the visualising facility of architects’ illustrations of past, present, or future constructions. We then notice texture, words, surface, and the drawings support materials, as the structure of our eyes is utilised.
My drawings can be seen as parallel realities - something just as likely to happen at any time, and just as real as the geography describing the places we inhabit.
Geography was once a horizontal scenographic conception of earth’s surface. The new geography where any level or space can be tracked to any other, the changing conception of “land surface”,and the colonisation of sky and subterranean space is an amorphous everchanging 3D geographic syntax.
This fuels my interest in, and use of, narrative structures of conflicting perspectival syntaxes, "extinction illusions" and spaces between indeterminate fragmentary horizon lines. A closer look shows this treatment of space can speak of social, economic, political and “overt no-go-areas”, revealing hidden landscapes of sovereign or economic empires and their mechanisms, which trace their presence throughout our urban rural and metropolitan environment.
The place names of sites I photograph and use as titles, go some, but not all the way, in describing a place, thus acknowledging distance. Distancing as ongoing consideration, also occurs as I rework and reconfigure the same photos many times in a series of contradicting and categorical breakings with the preceding drawing.
My drawings work with the photosensitive photocopy technology of melting and shaping emulsion powder onto surfaces. Photocopying is now an anachronistic technology, its changing role marks a distance in time.