ALEX HAMILTON | THE WEIRD WILES OF REPREHENSIBLE’S PENSIBLES

Press Release

In 2016 Alexander Hamilton spent six months living and working in New York. The Weird Wiles of Reprehensible’s Pensibles shows work done before, during and after his stay.  This title is styled after a sentence in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake ”...( scolled becauld  it was chalkfull of masterplasters and had borgeously letout gardens strown with cascades, pintacostecas, horthoducts and currycombs) and set off from Ludstown a spasso to see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways.”  Titles, and in particular words, will never say or do precisely what you want them to, especially in everyday speech.  The same also applies to matter, the base material that makes up the real non-symbolic world.   Responding to the subtle changes and differences in language and urban environment in the USA, UK and Australia, Alex works with and modifies the real, the everyday and the unnoticed.   In his large drawings he uses photos he takes of a site, which he photocopies and enlarges before re-planning and reconfiguring, using drawing, which includes erasure.  He reworks each photo many times in a contradicting categorical breaking with the previous reworked photocopied photo.  In his work with texts and books erasure also plays a large part. When we take a photo it is a cast of light on a flat surface and a slice of time which, like a drawing, is modified in our heads then modified again when seen in public and again as the private and public collide and adapt to each other.     

When we relate, describe, or make something stand in for reality, we revise, erase, insert, adapt, extend, and expand the real situation in an imagery of its deeper or supra real situation, in a similar way the processes through which Alex does his work points to the conceptual framework of his project, namely: by erasing key letters and words, the speech patterns of an American president are rendered more clear when they are seen as concrete sound shapes; place names go some but not all the way in designating real physical space; old joke books are seen as patterns of social behaviour and overt cultural re-engineering; and the energy of real spaces is excavated and made to overtly co-exist alongside its representation, constructing a real and meaningful present.

 Alex Hamilton, November 2017