Pages by Ann Hamilton

Pages, a series of cloth and word collages on book endpapers, was developed in the summer of 2017 during Ann Hamilton’s residency at the American Academy in Rome. These twenty newly-released unique works make relationships between fragments of silk, wool and cotton – cloth the artist was given while in Rome or acquired during multiple visits to Los Angeles – with words and sentence fragments culled from material retained from her 2009 project at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, human carriage. “Book weights,” conceived for the Guggenheim installation, aggregated cross-sections of multiple books, and the loose lines-remnants of that project became the basis for the found text in these collages.  Hamilton originally intended to use fine art paper as the basis for Pages, but found it too precious, so the collages were ultimately created on endpapers from a shelf of second-hand books left by former residents at the American Academy.