Amanda Hamilton comes to Taylor

By David Seaman | Echo

Art seems much more real when it is drawn from past experiences, from events that shaped an artist's life. The art that will be on display this Friday in the Metcalf Gallery reflects this idea.

Amanda Hamilton is an Associate Professor at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. Her exhibit is entitled "The Life of Perished Things." Inspired by the Pulitzer-nominated novel "Housekeeping" and her family's time in southern Idaho from 2005 until recently, the exhibit also explores Hamilton's family history.

Hamilton grew up in southern California and spent summers in Kentucky visiting family in a rural farm area. The family history that infuses "The Life of Perished Things" comes mostly from Kentucky.

"My family first settled in Jackson County, Ky., in the late 1800s," Hamilton said. Her family decided to build on top of a hill surrounded by valley, and as the decades went by the house became a meeting place where holidays and gatherings were held by the ever-growing family.

The house had a significant place in Hamilton's memory. "I made work about the place starting in 1998 and the image of the house reoccurs often," she said. "A few years ago the house burned down. No one had been living in it since my great-grandma Hazel passed away a few years earlier. It was shocking."

Hamilton's family eventually discovered that her uncle, Harold, had set the house on fire. He ensured the house would be empty, then secretly doused it in flames. "It seems he felt everything was changing too much and he didn't want anyone 'messing' with the old house," Hamilton said. "So he took that option away." Her uncle died shortly afterward in a tractor accident.

In 2004, Hamilton created a small-scale model of the house that she used for photographs, drawings, paintings and video work. "It felt right to burn that model down . . . so I did and ('The Life of Perished Things') began to grow out of that."

Along with the burned images of the Kentucky house, a photograph entitled "Drowning House" depicts her family's sale of their house and possessions in anticipation of their cross-country move from Idaho to Minneapolis. Hamilton was an associate professor of drawing and painting at Northwest Nazarene University in southern Idaho before moving this summer to Minneapolis.

Hamilton does not want people to take away something from her work but rather to explore it. "A great aspect of art-making and of viewing art is the opportunity of death," she said. "You have a chance to look closely, think deeply and reflect. It's not a process that has a stated end goal . . . it's a space to be and linger. I hope people who come to the show will slow down, sit for a while and just be. I'm sure something interesting will come of that."