UVP, Light Work Announce World Premiere Screening of Hamilton’s ‘Table of Contents’

A still image from “table of contents”

Urban Video Project and Light Work have announced the exhibition of “table of contents” (2013-2014), a new piece by celebrated multimedia artist Ann Hamilton, at UVP Everson from April 8-May 31.

Hamilton will present an artist talk on Tuesday, April 8, at 6:30 p.m. in the Everson’s Hosmer Auditorium. A reception and special Tuesday night screening will follow on the plaza, weather permitting. The talk and reception will be free and open to the public.

Coming out of her enthusiastically received Park Avenue Armory installation “the event of a thread” last year, Hamilton is known internationally for work that is at once monumental, yet intimate. With this installation, Hamilton utilizes the brutalist monumentality of the Everson’s I.M. Pei-designed building and adjoining public plaza as the proscenium stage for a piece about the space of performance—simultaneously public and intimate—and how we, as the audience, might occupy that space.

 About “table of contents”

Can the weight in the touch of a percussionist’s hand be visualized? How can a recording reveal the many subtle actions that bring forth musical virtuosity? What is the space between hearing and seeing, and how do we—the viewer-hearers—occupy this space?

Inspired by the variety shows of his youth, composer David Lang envisioned a nearly impossible synchronization of two percussionists when he originally wrote the score for his notoriously difficult piece “Table of Contents.” After seeing a performance in 2011, Hamilton imagined attaching an array of low-resolution mini surveillance cameras to the hands of the percussionists and instruments. In the resulting video piece, Hamilton’s “table of contents,” the cameras occupy the gap between hearing and seeing, and the edit generates a counterrhythm, a back-and-forth that brings us intimately into “impossible” virtuosity. In this sense, “table of contents” may be read as a working metaphor for Hamilton’s own practice, which trades in a virtuosic complexity from which, for all its seeming elaborateness, arises something poetically discrete in its impact.

Ann Hamilton

Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Hamilton received a B.F.A. in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985-1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.

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 and 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); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass. (2003); The Musee d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); the Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); and more.