Ghosts of Mars

dublin | arts and media | press release Thursday May 21, 2009 14:36 by Lee Welch - FOUR fourgallery at gmail dot com 119 Capel Street, Dublin 2 01 872 9315

FOUR Presents: Ghosts of Mars by Mark Hamilton

Curated by Leif Magne Tangen

Opening: Thursday 21 May 2009 6-9 pm
Exhibition continues from 22 May–18 July 2009

Mark Hamilton

Ghosts of Mars presents an installation generating an expanding network of reference and association from a stripped down configuration of material and media.

A set of two wall texts is formed from grids of sewing pins wrapped with black thread. Reconfigured from scraps of a novel, The Ticket That Exploded, they hover as screens, operating as both image and text. The works read as excerpts of paranoid messages or as fraught, fragmented signals from a future battlefield while visually transmitting a composite of conceptual and minimal methodology infected with craft materials. A type of hybrid and made from the repetitive (hand)work synonymous also with assembly line production and service sector labor.

Untitled (parallax) is a grouping of three single channel video loops filtered, cut and processed from found footage. These screens playback a flickering constellation of sets and ruins; debris falling through the atmosphere captured by the automated weapons system of a military helicopter, interiors and passageways in (the Nostromo) a massive mobile factory mining space, and tracking shots of an environment of towers, skeletal, ornamental, and constructed solely from scavenged materials.

The audio loop Untitled (blackbox recorder) is sequenced by traces of ambient room noise and the clicking of the tape device used to capture the original recording. The voice of “Tania”, a member of The Symbionese Liberation Army, repeats a statement of militant intent and militaristic syntax recorded in a period culminating in the group’s violent demise.

Ghosts of Mars modulates elements of an existing economy of signs, forms and quotidian material. Hamilton mines and filters themes of alienation, compulsion and disintegration combined with an investigation of established notions of meaning-production, reflecting on perceptual limits and processes of comprehension.

K.A. Kolenda

Mark Hamilton lives and works in Leipzig, Germany and is currently a stipendiary of the Cultural Foundation of Saxony. Previous solo exhibitions include Reverb, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2008) and Echoplex, Artists Space, New York (2006). Upcoming group exhibitions are at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy and Reduction and Suspense, Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria.

FOUR is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council.

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday: 12 to 5 pm

Arts Council Dublin City Council