Forti suggestioni presso la Henry Art Gallery col progetto installativo di Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E.
the common S E N S E is a museum-wide exhibition of newly commissioned works by American artist Ann Hamilton (born 1956). The Henry first featured Hamilton’s art in 1992 with an installation that occupied all the galleries of the museum’s original building designed in 1926 by Carl Gould. For accountings—a landmark event in Seattle—the museum became a landscape: its floors skinned with numbered steel tokens, its walls licked with candle soot, an oversized display case filled with wax votive heads, and two hundred canaries flying free. In 2009, the Henry invited Hamilton to return to the expanded museum, now quadrupled in size with the 1997 building designed by Charles Gwathmey.
For the common S E N S E, Hamilton conceived of the Henry as a hub connecting to the University of Washington’s collections and academic programs. As a Visiting Fellow, she conducted research in the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the University Libraries Special Collections, and the Henry’s holdings of costumes, textiles, and photographs. The material elements of the exhibition are drawn from these collections. Images of animals specimens; bestiaries and children’s ABC primers; fur, feather, and gut garments are stitched together with sound, voice, printed texts, and the movement of air in a building newly opened to light. Time is also a material of the exhibition. Over the six-month duration of the common S E N S E, the project will shift with some elements depleting and others accumulating. Periodically, the galleries will be animated by reading and singing.
Aristotle wrote in Historia Animalum and De Anima that “touch” is the sense common to all animal species. In this project, touch is not only physical contact but a form of intellectual and emotional recognition. The exhibition is full of images and skins of animals: once alive, they touched and were touched in return by the world they inhabited. For Hamilton the common S E N S E is “an address to the finitude and threatened extinctions we share across species—a lacrimosa, an elegy, for a future being lost.”
As part of the common S E N S E, you are invited to submit text fragments from published literature on the subject of touch. Selections from these submissions are available for visitors to collect throughout the exhibition. You may take a newsprint image of an animal specimen in our upper level galleries and add your image to the portraits of visitors accruing in our lower galleries. You may also sign up to be a reader/scribe. To learn more about these activities, read below.
