ATHENS, GA (PNAN) – Drawing upon her experiences in Kentucky, Florida and her maternal family’s farmland in western Tennessee, artist Allison Janae Hamilton uses this personal relationship with rural landscapes to illustrate how land influences people and power structures, especially how landscapes hold traces of the past and affect the present.
Her exhibition “Allison Janae Hamilton: Between Life and Landscape” is on view at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia through February 5, 2023.
“I’m using the landscapes I know most intimately to focus on the specifics of that landscape and consider the histories and narratives of displacement, land loss, bodies, ownership of space and migration around that space,” said Hamilton. “There is an assumption that the tie between landscape, the earth and Blackness is rooted solely in the past, that it’s not a contemporary lived experience. But that’s not true. I’m interested in all of these contemporary relationships between life and landscape.”
Nature also takes on the role of storyteller in Hamilton’s work. Her choice of landscape often holds historical significance. Her “Floridawater” series of photographs depicts the artist submerged in a canal off the Wacissa River, which was excavated using enslaved labor in the 19th century. Myth and folklore are also strong influences in her work. Spectral figures haunt Hamilton’s images and watch over the landscape.
“Allison Janae Hamilton’s films and photography are very much about the South, from the long histories of African American labor to the violent storms that have ravaged the region,” said Curator of American art Jeffrey Richmond-Moll. “But, for Hamilton, the southern landscape also raises larger questions about how all humans live with the land and how to navigate the contradictions of landscapes that are at once serene, fragile and haunted. Her work will evocatively complement other programs at the museum this fall that examine the past, present and futures of southern photography.”
For more information, http://www.georgiamuseum.org or call 706.542.4662.