Joe Hamilton at Nicholas Projects

Artist: Joe Hamilton

Exhibition title: The Deep Addressable Field

Venue: Nicholas Projects, Melbourne, Australia

Date: March 18 – April 2, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Projects

Vast layered terrains. Chaotic delamination. The texture of endless detail. Autonomous prototypes. 1200 iterations per second. Actions tracked and extended indefinitely. Industrial landscapes built on proprietary geomembranes lined with sensors. The thermal stability of nanostructured glass. Operational integrity and extravagant optimism. Philosophical problems inherent in the device. Subterranean cloud infrastructure. High spec rugged credentials. Carefully balanced climates.

The Deep Addressable Field is an exhibition that looks at contemporary landscape and its embedded layers of infrastructure and technology. The works incorporate found imagery of landscapes that have been composed and printed or adhered to various industrial surfaces. Many of the works feature a blocking of contrasting textures used to visualise the storage and transmission of data. The source material for the video work was selected from hundreds of corporate videos and together it depicts an overly positive outlook on big industry’s relationship to landscape. This exhibition seeks to portray a landscape that has, for better or worse, been appended and activated as an agent in our technological world.

Joe Hamilton (b. 1982 Tasmania) makes use of technology and found material to create intricate and complex compositions online, offline and in-between. His recent work questions our established notions of the natural environment within a society that is becoming increasingly networked. Hamilton holds a BFA from the University of Tasmania and an MA from RMIT in Melbourne. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at The Moving Museum Istanbul, The Austrian Film Museum, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and The New Museum in New York.