figura 23, Ann Hamilton

In 2010, the Spencer Museum of Art commissioned artist Ann Hamilton and her former KU professor Cynthia Schira to create works of art for the two-person exhibition An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton / Cynthia Schira (2013). Using digital technologies to express the essential nature of cloth and the ways museums organize and communicate the histories of objects, Hamilton and Schira transformed multiple galleries with their monumental installations. Both artists used images and objects from the Museum’s collection, evoking the stored collection and the Spencer Museum as a place, creating a rich and surprising tapestry that revealed the unique landscape of the collection.
For figura 23, Hamilton used a scanning process to capture the bottom half of a presepio figure, an object made in 18th-century Italy to be displayed in a public nativity scene. This large digital print mounted on fine gauge cheesecloth draws our attention to the present-day object and evokes the object’s native home, which is both thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart from us.

In 2010, the Spencer Museum of Art commissioned artist Ann Hamilton and her former KU professor Cynthia Schira to create works of art for the two-person exhibition An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton / Cynthia Schira (2013). Using digital technologies to express the essential nature of cloth and the ways museums organize and communicate the histories of objects, Hamilton and Schira transformed multiple galleries with their monumental installations. Both artists used images and objects from the Museum’s collection, evoking the stored collection and the Spencer Museum as a place, creating a rich and surprising tapestry that revealed the unique landscape of the collection.
For figura 23, Hamilton used a scanning process to capture the bottom half of a presepio figure, an object made in 18th-century Italy to be displayed in a public nativity scene. This large digital print mounted on fine gauge cheesecloth draws our attention to the present-day object and evokes the object’s native home, which is both thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart from us.

Artist Ann Hamilton transforms the presepio figures collected by Sallie Casey Thayer into ghostly impressions through the vision of a now obsolete flatbed scanner. Created for the Spencer’s 2013 exhibition An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton / Cynthia Schira, these large-scale prints on thin Gampi paper render a gestural drama through a blend of precision and blur.