LAURA K JONES ON ALEX HAMILTON AT T1+2, LONDON   

Saatchi Website


Another delightfully strange show from the never-pretentious gallerist Wolfe Lenciewicz. T1+2 saw a thrumming crowd at last Friday's opening private view for 'In Space We Trust' by the unusual young man Alex Hamilton. Hamilton has been a tutor at the Glasgow School of Art, he hails from Australia but has lived in Britain for years, and he once called a show of his 'Concrete, Sausage and other Team Ghosts.' This show, 'In Space We Trust' is his second solo exhibition with T 1 + 2.

Hamilton's pieces, landing somewhere between photography and drawing, contain a highly wrought set of interactions: between drawing and technologies of mass-reproduction, between map-making and insinuation, openness and abstraction. He explores "the generative potential of the distortions and slippages that occur when photographs are drawn on, photocopied, mutilated and reworked as prints or drawings". Most are sepia toned, washed out but highly intricate drawings, of ink-drawn waves that look like etchings, esoteric diagrams drawn over 1950s American photographs, pictures of fading forgotten corners and roadsides.

He's worked a lot with the format of newspapers in the past, and on one wall the front page of a broadsheet is re-imagined - it looks like a nebulous, repeating landscape, or perhaps a coded script.

More coded waves across the room come from thousands of black lines that morph into hair-tresses whose blank gaps form a star-shape, suggesting the American stars and stripes, or perhaps outer space.

The pipes and columns of a petrol station are extended endlessly, till they become the vectors and axes underpinning space itself. "My mum was driving me through Adelaide years and years ago," Alex told me, "but refused to stop for me when I wanted to take some photos. The result was a series of blurred images I took from the speeding car. I transferred them to watercolour paper and worked them up." The petrol stations seem to contain anamorphically stretched cars; white bilging clouds skid about above them.

One is reminded of empty spaces and crossroads here and indeed, throughout the show.

Wolfe tells me his artist works obsessively every day, "in an odd and interesting way. He has a strange and lateral way of thinking, working with very little colour, always coming up with something that seems to suggest alienation. Halfway between Baldessari and Hopper with a bit of concrete poetry knocked in."

Hamilton has in fact a great interest in concrete poetry, in the forms of the alphabet and questions of typography and 'spacing'. "We do not trust space," he says. "Spatial qualities are only as we find them and not as we wish them to be while they are under construction". I suppose he's looking for an anchor.

Laura K Jones