Pérez Art Museum Miami

Allison Janae Hamilton is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography and video. She considers her relationship to nature core to her practice, inspired by her family history and her own migrations across the country. Traveling from Kentucky, where she was born, to Florida, where she grew up, to rural Tennessee, the location of her maternal family’s homestead, and to New York, where she currently lives. Hamilton often works with natural material, such as reclaimed wood, animal skins and feathers, moss. While these collected materials become part of her sculpture practice, other local material such as Hamilton’s friends and family are often characters in her photographs and films.

Floridawater II is an archival pigment print, a photograph measuring two feet tall and three feet across. It is hung in landscape orientation, meaning that its longest side runs parallel to the ground.

The photo is taken underwater and shows a darker-skinned woman wearing a white dress and white tennis shoes. Her body is submerged just below the surface of the water, but her head cannot be seen as it is just above. She floats with arms extended, while one leg is kicking out and another is bent, as if the photo was taken mid action. The water is a little murky, with a dark greenish hue. Below her are aquatic plants and possibly some debris. Natural light filters from above and illuminates the woman’s body, giving the scene a peaceful and meditative quality.

Hew Locke is an artist born in Edinburgh in 1959 and raised in Guyana. He is known for working with various mediums including sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and installations. His work often explores colonialism and cultural identity while using diverse materials within his pieces. The piece Mosquito Hall can be interpreted as an ode to tropical landscapes and the relationship people have with it. The large woman can be seen as a goddess or as mother nature herself holding a child enveloped in greenery in the same way the building is enveloped by nature. The stark contrast in apparent styles of painting can be attributed to the fact that the piece is made of a photograph that has been painted over by the artist.

Mosquito Hall is a painting by Hew Locke made in 2013. It is made of Acrylic paint on chromogenic print. It measures roughly seven feet by four feet. It is hung in portrait orientation, meaning that its shortest side runs parallel to the ground.

The painting depicts a building surrounded by lush foliage and backed by the image of a large woman holding a child.

The foreground of the painting is made of mostly browns, greens, and blues that form a landscape that is like that found in many parts of Florida: densely populated trees and brush that is vibrantly green. Palm trees are seen sticking out from the tree line and their branches are leaning, appearing to be swayed by the motion of the breeze. Underneath the trees and brush, there is a body of water that is reflecting all the green and yellows surrounding it but with traces of light blue streaking down toward the bottom of the canvas. Sitting in this body of water is a small rectangular structure with six windows and sitting upon brown wooden stilts embedded in the ground. The railing of the balcony is covered in greenery that could be vines, moss, or hung plants.

Behind the foliage and the building, stands the image of a woman. She is wearing what appears to be jewels in her hair, giving the impression of a crown. On her body is a loose-fitting dress and in her right arm she holds a small child. The child is covered in plants and flowers. Both the woman and the child and all their clothes are painted monochromatically, meaning they are comprised of various tones of a limited color palette. They are bright green and yellow with their outlines being made of darker green and orange. Behind them the background is made of abstractions of figures that are difficult to make out. They are all painted in bright yellows and a deep orange which gives the impression of sunlight.

Jim Roche grew up in Northern Florida with a life, in his words, “oriented around nature.” After leaving for graduate school in 1966 and returning six years later in 1972, Roche was “saddened, shocked and angered” by the changes he saw in the environment. Many natural features that were once part of his home had disappeared; cut and torn down to make way for industrialization and new development.

In response, Roche created a series of photographs where he portrayed himself as “a Floridian who had just found out that the natural world was being destroyed drastically fast.” The eight photographs are in different natural locations, showing Roche performing a series of actions with branches taller than his own body, from walking to drawing on the ground. Each image is paired with a handwritten note with improvised rhyme, a stream of consciousness response to each site.

Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece is an installation of eight black and white photographs paired with eight pieces of paper with handwritten notes. Together, the images form a near perfect square. 

The photos are in a grid of four rows and four columns, with each photo aligned to the left paired with a note handwritten in pencil on the right. Each image shows Roche at a distance, caught performing different actions. To the right of each photograph, a piece of paper with cursive handwriting written in pencil provides a stream of consciousness style response to each site. 

On the top left, the image shows Roche crouched down in a grassy area inspecting a fallen tree branch. In the photos that follow it, he drags, draws, and poses with a branch that is taller than his own body. He wears jeans and a cowboy hat with boots, his buttoned-up shirt is wide open in some photos while completely buttoned up in others. Then, in his own words, “after choosing a special spot, I would voice out a phonic rhyme, a kind of free form vocal ‘riff,’ to help arrive at the written title, and feeling, of that physical spot, and what I absorbed there.” These thoughts and rhymes are in the notes accompanying each photograph. 

Marie Watt is a Native American artist born in 1967 in Seattle. She is of Seneca heritage. Watt is known for her textile-based works that are rooted in indigenous identity and memory. This is seen by her use of traditional Native American textile techniques like quilting, weaving, and sewing. In Companion Species, Watt explores the interconnection between everyone and all living things by having group sewing circles where each person sews their own word in their own style on to a piece of fabric that is then stitched together to create one large piece. The words in Guardian Tree allude to nature and highlight each person’s thoughts about nature. Together they create an abstracted landscape of earth told through words.  

Companion Species: Assembly (Guardian Tree) is an artwork by Marie Watt made in 2020. It is made of reclaimed wool, blankets, embroidery floss, thread, cotton twill tape, and tin jingles. It measures roughly eight feet by nine and a half feet. It is hung in landscape orientation, meaning that its longest side runs parallel to the ground.  

The piece is made of various pieces of fabric stitched together. The pieces of fabric all have words stitched on them in different styles and colors, although overall the fabric and stitching stick to a general color palette of aqua, brown, orange, grey, green, dark blue, and red orange. From the top left and moving to the right the words are as follows: 

“blood stars, moonlight, fall from the sky, brother auntie, milky way, lone planets, grandmother, origin stories, meteor (tin jingles are places here), father father, known and unknown universe, pine tree, rains, mountain, curves, settle, hey!, cornmeal, west, future, uncle, black earth, mist, tough winds, seeds, together, flood, shifting time, east, messenger, low tide, night sky, mouth, pacific, american sunrise, harvest, white earth, guardian tree, hey, red earth, grandfather, ceremony, rams, canyons, see, roots, all my relations, flint, oak, dark waters, crying, marble, first teacher, breathe in, cave wall, dying, seasons, anitmatter, grassy plains, horizon, dust, sister, impatient wind, midsummer, bones, atomic power, blue water, coral, garden, tribal ground,wild wind, frozen earth, whats going on, voices of mountains, warm southwind, red cliff, matter, muddy shore, c’mon man, today, nearest star, stray horses” 

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