Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl is pleased to announce new projects by Ann Hamilton, including eight screenprints, three blind-embossment etchings and twenty unique cloth and word collages created on book endpapers. The exhibition will be on view October 5 through November 30, and celebrates the artist’s nearly two decades of working with the Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. workshop.
Ann Hamilton welcomes experimentation and collaboration as integral possibilities in her work. New objects and directions have come out of her collaborative situations, and since the beginning of her relationship with Gemini, the artist has produced prints and inventive sculptural multiples using a variety of media and non-traditional materials.
The three most visually minimal works in the exhibition feature a printing technique of blind-embossment with hand- applied ink. To generate the text-based imagery for the largest of the three, Hamilton was inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and created a concordance layout. A concordance is a referencing method that alphabetizes the principal and recurring words of a large document into an index in order to examine intersections of context and detect the frequency of their usage. In RIGHTS and also a second smaller work, THE EQUAL AND INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF ALL, the center spine spells out the first sentence of the UDHR which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Using the same concordance technique, the third and smallest print, titled THE ANIMAL HAND, draws from Aristotle’s On the Soul, written in 350 B.C.E. about the nature of living things. The concordance texts, generated by the computer output, were photographically transferred to copper plates and then embossed onto damppaper “blindly,” or without any ink. After the paper was allowed to dry, the printers applied ink to the embossed surface using a tarlatan pad, lightly dabbing the pad into a pallet of ink and gently swiping it across the paper, building up thin layers of ink within the outlined shape until each impression achieved a uniform quality. The result is a delicate cloud of color, which subtly evokes the specter of a body or soul referenced in the text.
