SEATTLE, WA.- On October 11, Ann Hamilton returned to Henry Art Gallery with the museum-wide exhibition, the common S E N S E. On view through April 26, 2015, Hamilton’s large-scale, newly commissioned work occupies all galleries of the museum, and will evolve and change throughout the exhibition’s six-month run.

Hamilton’s immersive installations simultaneously respond to the social and architectural history of each site and pose broader questions about the human experience.

For the common S E N S E , visitors are invited on a sensory, tactile journey inspired by tangible and intangible ways of touching and being touched. Fur, feather, and gut garments, as well as scientific specimens and books such as bestiaries and children’s ABC primers from University of Washington collections serve as the physical threads of her Henry exhibition. Together, these materials create an exhibition that the artist describes as an elegiac accounting of the finitude and threatened extinctions we share across species. Hamilton remarks, “It is a lacrimosa for a future that is being lost.”

Using materials and representations of animals gathered from University of Washington Libraries Special Collections and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture as well as the Henry’s collection, Hamilton has created a set of poetic relationships that invite us to consider the closeness, the distance, and the interdependence between human and non-human animals. 

Hamilton says, “the common S E N S E is full of images and skins of animals. Once alive—they touched and were touched in return by the world they inhabited. Aristotle, in Historia Animalium and De Anima, wrote that touch is the sense common to all species. We stroke a pet, reach to draw a curtain and feel the fineness of the cotton, touch the hand of another person. In silence or in speech, reading and being read to are other forms of touch.”

One installation offers visitors close observation of over forty rarely seen garments from the Henry’s and the Burke’s collections that are made from animal parts. Another installation allows visitors to view and take away photographic images on newsprint of mammal, bird, and amphibian study specimens. A third installation contains a field of twenty-one mechanized bullroarers—an instrument traditionally used to call across distance, and gather people together. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, singers and musicians will address the installations using voice and other instruments.

“Hamilton’s work is highly collaborative,” says Henry Director Sylvia Wolf. “We look forward to community participation becoming part of the process over the duration of the exhibition.” Visitors will be encouraged to sign up and read out loud to the materials and representations of animals from a changing book chosen by Hamilton. In addition, an online call for submissions invites anyone interested in the project to submit a brief selection from their own reading about touch to the Tumblr site Readers Reading Readers. Selections of these excerpts, made by the Henry and the artist, will be printed and distributed in the galleries for visitors to collect in a folder that will accompany them on their experience through the exhibition.

In developing the common S E N S E and the activities that accompany it, Hamilton and the Henry collaborated with partners across the University of Washington and the region—including the UW School of Music, the Burke Museum, the UW Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, Seattle Arts and Lectures, and Olson Kundig Architects.

“Inviting artists to consider the Henry as a laboratory for taking risks and developing new work has been a distinguishing hallmark of the museum since its inception,” Wolf continues. “the common S E N S E is in keeping with the Henry’s commitment to deep collaborations with innovative artists and our mission to advance contemporary art, artists, and ideas.”

An artist of exceptional international significance, Hamilton has intervened, interpreted, and transformed numerous spaces in the past, including a 1992 installation, accountings, commissioned by the Henry. For that installation, the gallery floors were skinned with steel tokens, the walls were licked with candle soot, wax votive heads filled an oversized vitrine, and two hundred canaries flew free.

She has also shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanås Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2009); and New York’s Park Avenue Armory (2012). Hamilton is the recipient of many honors including a MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Tiffany Foundation Award, and Guggenheim Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 São Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, Ohio. Presently, she is a Distinguished University Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.

In 2004, Hamilton created the permanent installation LEW Wood Floor for the opening of the Seattle Central Public Library, with raised letters spelling out the first sentences from books in the library’s collection in 11 languages. Most recently, Hamilton was selected from a pool of over 340 applicants for a large-scale, outdoor commission on the new public piers as part of Waterfront Seattle, a city-funded project to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with 26 acres of new public space, streets, parks, and buildings. Hamilton will join a team of architects, planners, and city designers to make the waterfront an active cultural center for Seattle.