| Kara Hamilton | March 18 – April 23, 2016 |
| Organized by Beth Stuart Exhibition title by Angie Keefer |
Madeline Albright, former US secretary of state, has a collection of brooches she would choose from depending on her mood and her diplomatic position. There is a story about her being in talks with Syria and Israel and when reporters asked her what was going on she pointed to her mushroom pin: “sometimes talks, like mushrooms, do better in the dark for a little while.”
Kara Hamilton makes jewelry. While this is certain, it is often less certain whether the jewelry she makes is an adornment for a human body, or an architecture, or something more elusive: an ideology, an encounter, a space in time, an idea of self? While we might understand jewelry to have a determinate relationship with desire, the objects Kara makes fluster this determinacy, determinately. There is no fixed relationship to the language of commodity, or design, or to contemporary art. The objects that she makes gesture toward functionality, wearability. They gesture to architectures and languages we can own and understand: our bodies, our homes, our galleries, our celebrities, our poverty, and relationally, to a reflection on the possibilities and failures of desire. You might want to put that necklace on? You could try and put that necklace on, but be careful, it might cut you.
Here, Hamilton has made a constellation of objects that yesterday she called jewelry for the Kremlin. Their material is all pilfered from the waste of architecture and industrial fabrication. She calls them prototypes for stolen artifacts. They are bright and sharp and they speak many languages. They talk about street fashion and iconoclasm at the same time whispering about the trade show and the showroom. They talk about gaudiness and luxury. There may be a thing that looks like Cyrillic. Or maybe it is bubble letters. It is also reminiscent of the most refined modern Swiss typography. Is the space a hotel lobby, or a living room? Is it a furniture store, or a teenager’s basement bedroom? In fact, I think it might be an alien version of the Situation Room. You might not fully know what the voices are saying, but “sometimes talks, like mushrooms, do better in the dark for a little while.”
Kara Hamilton studied architecture at the University of British Columbia and art at Concordia University and Yale. She has shown extensively in North America and Europe, is represented by Salon 94 in New York City, and comprises one half of the curatorial team that is Kunstverein Toronto.
