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Artist or Maker: Ann Hamilton (b.1956)

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Provenance: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Exhibited: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, on permanent loan, May 2000-June 2003.

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Notes: Ann Hamilton's complex relationship to text is the core of abc.table. Her affection for both the spoken and the written word makes her more indebted to writers than to visual artists. Language is key to her choice of elements in her installations and to her overall process.
In 1994-1995 Hamilton received a Wexner Center Residency Award and abc.dot was executed in this critical period. This work includes a domestic furnishing element, a table, which integrates a screen, as well as a piece of fabric, a remainder of her training in textile design. The black and white video is shot from underneath a glass table. With her finger, the artist slowly erases an ephemeral dust alphabet written on the glass, addressing issues of memory and loss. She removes the communicative properties of text, and in so doing, the process is reversed, the video is inverted, the text appears from nothingness. Hamilton is able to explore the disjunction between what is visible and what is hidden, the poetic gesture and its technological manufacture.