In Space We Trust

 

18.05.07 –19.05.07


Alex Hamilton’s latest work contains an elaborate set of interactions: between drawing and technologies of mass-reproduction, cartography and allusion, legibility and abstraction. The front page of a newspaper is re-imagined – perhaps as a vague, semi-repeating landscape, or perhaps as coded script containing other information as it directs those-who-know to somewhere else. Waves made up of thousands of black lines morph into hair-tresses whose blank gaps form a star-shape, suggesting the American flag, 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.

For years now, Hamilton has been exploring the generative potential of the distortions and slippages that occur when photographs are drawn on, photocopied, mutilated and reworked as prints or drawings. He has spoken recently of his interest in concrete poetry, in the forms of the alphabet and questions of typography and ‘spacing’. In Space We Trust gathers these concerns into a body as coherent as it is challenging, confronting us with the question as to what – in language, information relay, aesthetic form or, indeed, national, geographical or ideological adherence – we might use as a bedrock for conviction, to anchor us in space.

Tom McCarthy 2007