Ann Hamilton, Jae Ko, Linda Fleming, Judy Pfaff, Derrick Velasquez, Ted Larsen



Ann Hamilton: Selected Works

"My first hand is a sewing hand. A line of thread drawn up and down through cloth influences how I think about the confluence and rhythms of space and time. The edition of ciliary began with the extension of a single line. Drawn, sewn or written, a line contains all the attention present in its moment of making, the rhythms of breath and body, the weather of hesitations and the stutter of the hand orbiting in the body’s immediate periphery. Folded, cut or accreted, the line’s incessant horizontality returns to itself and takes a circular form. It is simple work; it requires the body to be slow.

For me, the circle of the hand making is the first eye. It is the empty center in the tower, the clearing in the forest, where with the fundaments of cloth and paper and line we weave and re-weave unending relations." - Ann Hamilton

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its third showing and second solo exhibition for internationally recognized, American artist Ann Hamilton. Known for her large-scale multi-media installations, Hamilton’s sensory driven and deeply poetic work often merges the visual with both performance and sound-based expressions. Working in uniquely innovative ways, the artist transforms the traditional mediums of printmaking, photography, video, sculpture and textile work, either by process or stance. As a recognized McArthur Foundation Fellow, Hamilton’s genius brings with it a distinguished sense of the experimental as she approaches her on-going themes of “the body” and “being” with work that contains wide-ranging conceptual underpinnings.

The current exhibition dramatically features select large and small scale works from six different series produced over many years including “ciliary,” “visite,” “voce,” “body objects” and more. Many of the works are showcased on the award winning PBS television series and publication, art:21, which continues to distinguish Ann Hamilton as a groundbreaking and thought-provoking artist. In specific to “Selected Works,” regarding the “ciliary” series, the magazine states that it represents “a culmination of Hamilton’s decade-long collaborative relationship with Gemini G.E.L. and marks a new level of achievement in her work with printmaking. With a diameter of nearly five feet, each ciliary is a wall-mounted object of a human scale that yet lends a sense of quiet magnitude to the space it occupies. Comprised of accordion-folded lithographs that compress bands of meandering lines of varying intensity, each is punctuated by a burst of fabric in a coordinating color at the center. The form is at once familiar and mysterious, bringing to mind numerous associations, both natural and man-made: the cross-section of an immense tree, a dancer’s unfurled skirt, a folded fan, an eye, a seventeenth-century Dutch collar, as well. These references spring naturally from the circular structure – a response Hamilton purposefully elicits from the viewer- born of her meditations on the timelessness of this shape and its symbolism across time and cultures.”

Exhibited nearby are Hamilton’s “visite” print series. Based on photographs from 19thC albumen prints the size of a calling card – cartes de visite – the artist re-photographed the faces with a miniature hand-held surveillance camera affixed to her finger. This imagery manifested as the dominant element in “visite,” a layered lithographed series with its chine colléd signature “O” and a wide band of richly-colored fabric on diaphanous Japanese paper. Each remarkable work in the series affirms the artist’s contemplative and yet, startling union of image and material.

Ann Hamilton’s voce series (referencing the artist’s larger work entitled voce: house of the mouth), was published by the artist and Robischon Gallery. The evocative images exemplify the artist’s embrace of such interconnected relationships within her own vocabulary, from her captured video stills to the enveloping voce projection and performance first shown in Kumamoto, Japan. Emanating from five, individual spinning projectors, the voce video and subsequent still images of faces or feet were part of an elaborate performance which also included an assembled installation of tables – stacked atop with carefully folded ceremonial kimonos, illuminated by a single desk lamp aside a vintage radio - all sheathed in diaphanous, silk organza. The site's large two-gallery spaces offered the opportunity for simultaneously paired performances - two languages and two species (human voice and songbird) creating thresholds of adjacency in contrast. In Hamilton’s artistic vocabulary the piece was intended to merge a condition of opposites: full/empty; above/below; light/dark; still/quickened and weighted/weightlessness. The installation was further layered by an intriguing unique performance by visitors. Each was invited to vocally improvise along with the prompts of a teaching CD to join in with a cacophonous chorus of bird calls which were earlier recorded in Japan by Hamilton. The artist’s sense of the universal with a reverence toward the distinct language of each being and place was also represented in voce by the symbolic images of the ancestors as the abiding “voice of memory.” The piece in its entirety reflects this shared expression, the site from which each new generation makes its own stand as the various incarnations of voce aptly reveal the artist’s stratified and soulful stance.

The earliest works within the exhibition are Hamilton’s pivotal “body object” series, shown in the Viewing Room gallery. This series offers an historical look into the artist’s ingenious and multi-purpose conjunction of material and object as a sensory and psychological expression. By taking a singular element from a previous performance or installation and using it to become part of an editioned photographic series, the artist expanded her visual vocabulary to “fix an object within a particular moment in time.” For example, the prickly hide-like, toothpick suit which Hamilton created for her installation entitled, suitably positioned at Yale University, was worn for its performance variant at Franklin Furnace in New York (both in 1984), along with the duct work, flashlight and fish-lure suits – and continue on as image in Hamilton’s silver-print portraits. The duel calendar year assignment indicates both the year the photograph was taken followed by the year the edition was published such as 1984/2006. Also on view, are two additional C-print photographs from 1987, in the time it takes to fry a locust and the choice a salamander gave to Hobson, Hamilton questioned whether it was necessary for any audience to witness her performances and staged several installations strictly for the camera alone. However, like “body objects,” this work was a prelude to an installation entitled dissections… they said it was an experiment at Artists Space, New York and later at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1988. For this dynamic approach, writes Joan Simon for Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects, “images juxtapose functional elements in dysfunctional relation” with titles intended to communicate a state of mind with which to view the photograph of the artist as she appears to walk on an electrical current toward a television.

These early works reflect Ann Hamilton as the artist of distinction she was soon to become. According to the preeminent installation artist Judy Pfaff, Hamilton’s Yale professor, Hamilton came to her artistic beginnings “fully formed.” Pfaff states, “Hamilton knew who she was and which language she wanted to explore.” Over the decades, this same self-knowledge and commitment are visible within “Selected Works” – offered as a glimpse into Hamilton’s larger, layered world.

Ann Hamilton studied textile design at the University of Kansas and received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 1985. Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world. Her major museum installations include Park Avenue Armory (2013); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2010); The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006); La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988).



Jae Ko: Force of Nature

“Nature rules the creative process. As the paper absorbs the ink, its shape changes…it may collapse inward expressing a depth of emotion – or it may be domed as if an expression of great hope. It’s in the potential of the common materials to be transformational…” — Jae Ko

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its fifth solo exhibition for internationally-recognized, Korean-born sculptor Jae Ko. Prominently featured in the gallery is an installation of Ko’s “Force of Nature,” which debuted to critical acclaim at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C. in 2011. With the artist’s chosen medium of paper, Ko works in a more improvisational free-form manner stacking bundles as she shapes space. In a different approach than her signature rolled and glued works, Ko re-engages with over one hundred, large, loose bundles of brown craft paper to engulf a gallery wall measuring nearly 40-feet in length. As in all of the artist’s works, transforming common materials in pioneering and ingenious ways has been the hallmark of Ko’s lengthy and noteworthy career. In addition to the Force of Nature installation, a series of ink-soaked sculptures, in both her rolled and twisted techniques, are exhibited in contrast and as compliment to the recycled paper of the shape-shifting, massive scale, Force of Nature. Unlike her individual wall works, Force of Nature tests a kind of gravitational tipping point – its form pushing at the edge of collapse. Nonetheless, the installation remains fixed as each soft, asymmetric spool relies, in mass, upon the next.

Jae Ko’s sense of form and personal process of utilizing rolled paper – namely adding machine paper as her chosen medium for wall and floor sculptures – has made Ko uniquely influential as a distinctive artist. Well-known for her earlier series of contained circular, ink-soaked sculpture with velvet-like, ribbon surfaces, her later smooth-surfaced spun works offer a shift in both form and approach. In this series, Ko’s twisted or torqued rolls of paper are transformed to resemble animated, pulled taffy-like shapes with rich, matte surfaces of calligraphy ink, Sumi ink, graphite or carpenter’s glue. Having explored a dramatic color range intermittently throughout her career from jarring greens and electric blues, the artist’s signature palette always returns to the nature-based tonalities of coal black, deep crimson and butter yellow of the natural world. The sweeping, undulant lines of Jae Ko’s sculptures recall the wind-whipped pines in frozen motion and were inspired by the ancient bristlecone pine forests in California’s White Mountains. Furthering the artist’s initial inspiration, Ko distills her elegant forms and achieves technical and thematic resonance in an ever-evolving relationship between idea and medium.

Based in Washington, D.C., Jae Ko is a Pollack-Krasner Foundation award recipient and has a B.F.A. from Wako University in Tokyo, Japan and an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. is currently being shown in “Speculative Forms” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the artist is working toward a large-scale installation exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey which opens in March of 2015 that will be over 100 feet wide 20 feet tall in an 8,000-square-foot gallery.



Linda Fleming, Judy Pfaff, Derrick Velasquez and Ted Larsen

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition including new and recent work by the acclaimed and noteworthy artists, Judy Pfaff, Linda Fleming, Derrick Velasquez and Ted Larsen. With a cross-section of materials from repurposed metals to precision cut chromed steel to draped vinyl to melted plastic and paper collage, each artist distinguishes themselves as an innovator in their respective field.