Artist: Graham Hamilton
Exhibition title: Dearly
Venue: Theta, New York, US
Date: April 7 – May 13, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton wanted to bring fowers to New York and here—open your arms! Open your eyes! Do you know who you are?
All kinds of visual and material fullnesses populate Dearly. The spirit is of generosity and doubt. Hamilton is homesick. A sincere question hovers in these prints and sculpture about how art ultimately resolves or fnds itself in a superabundant world and whether meaning is as eschatologically dispersed as a camera fash on fowers.
Fashion photography is not what I expected to say next but Hamilton is interested in collecting and arranging and therefore in economies of desire. He has a real love for movements (Art Nouveau) and places (fea markets) and I guess industries (luxury fashion) that recycle material history and derive their strange yet inviting aesthetics from obsession and fawed taxonomy.
But back to photography… What Peter Schjeldahl wrote about Wolfgang Tillmans dropping a fgurative but also literal pane of glass through a party with his photographs might help me say how Hamilton’s methods, from screenprinting to iPhone scanning to fower arranging to framing, both are and are in his images. Stars are a technology. Hamilton has a knack for timeliness. What is being tested is how faithfully the intervention of making into living can be shown without becoming a metaphor.
Since it is me who risks overburdening the work, I will say that what I think art wants from poetry is to employ the meaningful and affective qualities of language without the yoke of discourse. I can relate. I too want writing to be additive, to fnd freedom in my own formal and material processes. A poem adds up to tension as well as image and reserves the right not to be instrumentalized for or against itself. This may explain a perverse streak in Dearly’s elaborateness and resplendence where what I come away with is unsolid.
So if I stick with this and call enjambment the break in the framing system or the schism of sign from symbol or the discoloration of cells in the laserjet prints, I can better say how Dearly—layers of life and matter and allusion, improvised and appropriated systems of reference and inference and artifact—affects me with the surprising spareness of the gift. And why I keep thinking about John Ashbery, who had to apologize for his poetry. For the uncertainty or faw that sensitized his work to the world, ecstatically repeating and compounding in its subject matter and the way it is made.
— Amelia Stein
Graham Hamilton (b. 1988, New York) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Recent solo exhibitions include Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); False Flag Gallery, Long Island City (2018); Index, Hudson (2018); Baba Yaga Gallery, Hudson (2018). He is a 2021 graduate of Städelschule.
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Silkscreen, marker, and watercolor on paper 25½ x 23¾ in, 36 x 34½ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Silkscreen, marker, and watercolor on paper 25½ x 23¾ in, 36 x 34½ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silskcreen and Gaudi bronze powder on Chromolux 27½ x 39 in, 28⅞ x 40⅝ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on Chromolux, 12 x 27½ in, 12½ x 28 in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on paper, 27½ x 39 in, 28⅞ x 40⅝ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on paper, 27½ x 39 in, 28⅞ x 40⅝ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on colored paper, 11¾ x 16½ in, 14⅜ x 19 in
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2023, Unique print, Silkscreen ink on mold paper, 27½ x 19¾ in, 28 x 20⅛ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Silkscreen on fiber paper, 24 x 28 in, 25⅞ x 30¼ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Silkscreen on fiber paper, 24 x 28 in, 25⅞ x 30¼ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on Chromolux, 19½ x 14 in, 21½ x 15⅜ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Parade 2, 2023, Inkjet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal, 83 x 55 x 35½ in
Graham Hamilton, Parade 2, 2023, Inkjet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal, 83 x 55 x 35½ in
Graham Hamilton, Parade 2, 2023, Inkjet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal, 83 x 55 x 35½ in
Graham Hamilton, Parade 2, 2023, Inkjet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal, 83 x 55 x 35½ in
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silskcreen and Gaudi bronze powder on Chromolux 27½ x 39 in, 28⅞ x 40⅝ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silskcreen and Gaudi bronze powder on Chromolux 27½ x 39 in, 28⅞ x 40⅝ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2023, Unique print, Silkscreen on Chromolux, 19½ x 27½ in, 21 x 28⅞ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on mold paper, 19 x 22¼ in, 21 x 24⅛ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on mold paper, 19 x 22¼ in, 21 x 24⅛ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on colored paper, 11¾ x 16½ in, 14⅜ x 19 in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Untitled, 2022, Unique print, Silkscreen on colored paper, 27½ x 19½ in, 29½ x 21½ in (framed)
Graham Hamilton, Dearly, 2023, exhibition view, Theta, New York