By Leah Triplett Harrington
Abed Elmajid Shalabi’s When Tomorrow Arrives We Love Life comprises nine elegant, spare sculptures installed at irregular intervals throughout the Hamiltonian Artists space. Each sculpture riffs on car culture and is made from a cast or literal piece of a car or truck. Gas nozzles, road signs, a truck bed, or car seats repeat throughout, but not as abstract motifs; these are actual objects synonymous with distances, journeys, and travel, which are the exhibition’s implicit themes.….
By Wayson Jones
Words fail, and then the fun begins.
In his solo show at Hamiltonian Artists, Kyrae Dawaun tightly weaves concept, narrative, craft, and form into a river-of-consciousness whole, the effect of which is at once exhilarating and deeply moving.….
By Gregg Bordowitz
Jason Bulluck’s exhibition and all the work included under its title Let’s Believe Brief Utopias proceed from the foundational premise that the privileged site of art—art’s placement in the gallery, art’s here-and-now—is dispersed. The show’s manifestations in many forms are distributed through time, space, motion, and exchange—here, there, everywhere, and nowhere—all at once.…
By Hannah Barco
On a recent visit to ceramicist Ara Koh’s studio, I observed a brief exchange between a deaf visitor, her translator, and the artist. The visitor wanted to know how a series of ceramic objects had been made. […] Koh explained her process of using a clay extruder, likening it to a sausage making machine; the ASL translation included several signs that looked like what they described (the iconicity of sign language that is often mistaken as pantomime). The sign for machine leverages the knuckles to interlock like gears and show the beginning of a rotation, fingers enmeshed.…
By Mauricio Alejo
Good artists are always foreigners. I don’t mean in regards to the soil they come from; rather in the ways in which they relate to reality.…
The following Essays on Art series is jointly published in partnership with East City Art to promote critical writing on visual art in the greater DC area.
By Hiba Ali
Absence serves as the doorway that molds grief into the very foundation of home; it is a gateway for processing emotions.…
By Marcus Civin
Do we need to practice playing? Are we still too often stressed with work? Even in our free time, it seems we chase outcomes, simulate, or code for play instead of just playing.…
By Lucy Lippard
Stephanie Garon is uniquely prepared to mine the residue and history of a spurious “gold rush,” in northern Maine, of all places. I’ve been to Maine every summer of my octogenarian life and until two years ago I had no idea that mining was a factor in the state’s environmental history. Garon is an eco-artist with a science degree from Cornell and a deep commitment to research on nature’s side.…
By Mark Anthony Hernández Motaghy
Why do we buy certain things? Why do we save certain things? Amber Eve Anderson asked me these questions during our first conversation, leading us to further inquiries about commodity logistics and how we ascribe value to objects once we acquire them.…
By K. Lorraine Graham
The site-specific installation ruined on a riverbank (2022), Joey Enríquez’s solo exhibition which ran last spring at Hamiltonian Artists, used found bricks, construction detritus, plaster brick casts, various types of earth, and historical real estate development maps to evoke the layered and fragmented histories of construction, labor, and place-making, in the District.…
By Danielle O’Steen, Ph.D.
There is an odd familiarity in the objects that Washington-based artist Madeline Stratton uses in her sculptures and reliefs. Items like a door knocker, a hinge, a bracket, or a screen door all appear as components in the abstract artworks that populate her exhibition at Hamiltonian Artists titled We Were Here (2022).…
