Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up

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For nearly two decades, Anthea Hamilton has developed a complex practice that spans sculpture, installation and performance. Hamilton dives without restraint into the meandering history of visual and cultural production, using her eye as a both subjective and productive lens through which to view (and recreate) the world. Her installations—which combine unexpected materials, scale and humour—propose an alternative and fragmented reality where gender roles, sexualities, food, domestic life, nature, and the traditions of different cultures, all rescind their status of firmly established clichés and become fluid notions. Hamilton’s practice therefore relies on a strong belief in cohabitation, complexity and, by extension, imagination, positing the artworks’ ontological ambiguity as a means to constantly challenge our perceived realities.

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Using the “mash up” as her method, she masterfully filters and assesses elements culled from the present and recent past of fashion, art, food, nature, design, architecture and pop culture. She then resituates what we might otherwise consider familiar or comforting tropes and motifs in a continuous bid to sidestep obvious and hegemonic meanings.