The solo exhibition, reading, at Carl Solway Gallery, marks the publication of new print editions by the internationally known artist, Ann Hamilton. The project is curated to draw together a selection of Hamilton's recent work that engages the experiences, process and act of reading. The artist describes the experience of reading as one that might leave the reader forever changed, yet leave no material trace; Hamilton asks how this ephemeral act might become a form of materialized making, a form of drawing.  These questions have informed large-scale architectural works  recently installed at the Seattle Public Library, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, as well as the objects and prints that comprise this exhibition.

Blue prints titled reading, evidence Hamilton's notations and underlinings in book passages. In its process of recording, this ongoing series becomes a diary of attention to word, line phrase and meaning as they emerge from the text blocks of a page. Rotating video projections animate alphabetically organized spines of words photographed with a miniature surveillance video camera, which sits like a pencil in Hamilton's hand and has functioned over the years as a central stylus of her making.  Utilizing stills taken from this video, she has created a new series of printed words which emerge from the process of reading with a camera and fix in time its fleeting moment.

The series, book weights (human carriage), published with Carl Solway Gallery, were made by placing small stacks of cut and rejoined paperback book sections on a digital scanner. These archival inkjet prints have a monumental sculptural quality, but the original book stacks are the scale of a human hand.  Book weights (human carriage), developed as an outgrowth of Hamilton's installation human carriage, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as part of the 2009 exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia 1890-1989.  In this installation, the reconfigured book stacks acted as counterweights to a wheeled carriage housing two suspended Tibetan cymbal bells that traveled on a pipe following the spiral shape of the museum's rotunda in a system exchanging weight for weightlessness and sound for the silence of reading.  As the book weights were packed for shipment to the museum, Hamilton and her assistants placed them on a scanner as a method for recording the inventory.  During the process an unexpectedly beautiful body of new work emerged.

Ann Hamilton is internationally known for large-scale multi-media installations.  Her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.  In addition to these large installations, she is known for smaller- scale multiples and print editions.  Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and the Heinz Award.  She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale and has been extensively exhibited around the world.

Born in Lima, Ohio in 1956, Ann Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985.  From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara.  In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, Ohio.  Since 2001, she has been a Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.