Ann Hamilton

Containing the quality, pace, and tone of an internal dialogue, the sound of a voice reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and The Body Electric [both 1855] was that of a voice reading softly to oneself, and the text was perceived as recounting to oneself, as if to remember, rather than as performative projection.

Seated at a table between a bowl of raw dough and a basket used at the turn of the century to deliver bodies to the morgue, I slowly stuffed a piece of dough into my mouth until it took the form and impression of the mouth’s hollow space. The dough containing the impression of this inner orifice was then placed in the bottom of the casket. The activity, repeated slowly, half-filled the basket over the course of two weeks. –Ann Hamilton