In My Obsession, one inventive particular person reveals their most prized assortment.
Allison Janae Hamilton is greeted by seven generations of girls in her household each time she enters her Chelsea, Manhattan, studio. The 40-year-old artist, who labored within the vogue business earlier than she started to make work, movies and installations impressed by landscapes within the American South, grew up in Florida and visited her household’s farm in Carroll County, Tenn., each summer time. A couple of years in the past, she started digitizing copies of ancestral information — letters, yearbooks, handwritten recipes — all saved in bins and albums on the property. She additionally discovered household information on-line, together with her grandfather’s World Struggle I draft card and an 1860 “slave schedule,” an official authorities file of enslaved folks that was a part of the U.S. census. Most prized are the pictures that present kin on the farm as they feed animals and lift youngsters. When “everybody has been born and handed away” on the identical land, “you may have only a huge quantity of artifacts,” she says.
About 4 dozen photographs, many in classic frames, look down on Hamilton as she works at her wood desk. Even seemingly unrelated initiatives, like her exhibition that includes celestial work that opened in January on the New York gallery Marianne Boesky, are imbued with the spirit of the gathering. (The form of clouds in a single portray, for instance, echoes the silhouette of a gaggle photograph of her household within the studio.) “There’s a frequency I’m capable of faucet into simply by being surrounded by them whereas I’m working,” Hamilton says of the photographs.
The gathering: “Household images and artifacts from rural western Tennessee that date from the 1800s to the current.”
Variety of items within the assortment: Greater than 1,000 authentic paperwork and pictures are saved on the farm and in kin’ houses. Hamilton has copies of a number of dozen in her studio.
First acquisition: “My mother’s highschool yearbook photograph. On the again, she [wrote that] she wished to be a vogue purchaser and dwell in an enormous metropolis. She stayed within the South, however … I took on that life-style in a manner, shifting to [New York] and having a profession in vogue after which in artwork.”
Newest acquisition: “Once I was pregnant with my daughter — the seventh lady within the line — I used to be on a mission to discover a image of my great-great-great-grandmother Piney. My mother discovered one at my grandmother’s home whereas constructing her a storm shelter.”
Weirdest: “I’ve a love notice from my dad to my mother after they have been in school. [It’s written in] the language of the ’70s. It says one thing like, ‘Do I knock you out?’”
Most wanted: “There’s a rumor that we now have Grandma Piney’s midwifery papers in some closet. She delivered most of my grandmother’s siblings.”
Most valuable: “I’ve all 4 portraits of my great-grandmothers. Actually robust portraits in an analogous format — the identical orientation [and] composition. They’re totems to me.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photograph assistant: Storm Harper