Turning to Hear, See, and Touch: Ann Hamilton’s Textured Images

Before laying eyes on Ann Hamilton: still and moving • the tactile image at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), visitors first make contact through sound at a distance. A pair of pole-mounted Leslie speakers beckons museum-goers with mysterious pings, chirps, and whistles.[1] Entering the first of two rooms that make up this exhibition, viewers encounter a theatrical presentation in a dimly lit environment (fig. 1). Here the arrested poses of colorfully costumed figures seem caught between curtain calls on a slick wooden stage where visitors mirror these larger-than-life characters through gesticulation. The reverberating, high-pitched chimes vaguely recall the cue for seating before a play.

Nearly a decade in the making, Ann Hamilton: still and moving • the tactile image, organized by Curator of Photography, Barbara Tannenbaum, builds on the artist’s past experiments with sound, installation, and photography.[2] For this exhibition, Hamilton descended into museum storage and selected twenty-four rarely exhibited wooden, terracotta, and porcelain figures to be the focus of her gentle gaze. Using a handheld scanner, she explored the surfaces of these highly detailed and articulated (if diminutive) forms, which were covered by a translucent plastic (fig. 4).[3] Hamilton has often underscored the concept of turning as key to this presentation, a concept she understands as “rotating in space but also transforming—and the relationship between image, experience, and language.”[4] Turning appears in Hamilton’s new works through myriad ways: these still and moving images simulate other media, gesture toward how one artistic form begets another. An unconventional exhibition (and a bit of a curatorial gamble, given the number of moving parts), in the end it pays off for the patient visitor.

Monumental scanned and printed images of blurry figures from the Majapahit dynasty of Eastern Java, Qing dynasty China, and crèche characters from Naples greet visitors in the first gallery. Pulled from disparate cultural contexts, including personal devotion, decorative ensembles intended for aristocratic homes, and Neapolitan nativity displays, these figures have been cast in an oblique, indeterminate narrative. Hamilton puts the viewer to work to suss out this story. A glance around the room reveals that these spectral figures are oriented differently; they do not occupy a singular spatial plane, thus embodying Hamilton’s core notion of turning.

Appearing in the pink-colored robe, the Virgin Mary from the crèche group is replicated three times, like a stock-motion character or perhaps a visual stammer—a glitch from the scanning process (fig. 5). These flattened and truncated objects feel their way through a crumpled, translucent veil of space and time. To adhere the large printed images to sheets of canvas, Hamilton used wheat paste, whose materiality further links her project to theater since this adhesive is commonly used to affix ephemeral posters for advertising. The fourteen-foot-high undulating canvases impart a subtle degree of movement.

The topography of these hanging canvases bear the marks of intense handling, pointing to the artist’s hands, to the work’s original maker, patrons, and any intervening touch, from fabrication to final museum acquisition. One might recall Rosalind Krauss’s admonishment: “[…] meaning does not precede experience but occurs in the process of experience itself. It is on the surface of the work that two senses of process coincide—there the externalization of gesture meets with the imprint of the artist’s act as [she] shapes the work.”[5] Here Krauss was describing the sculptures of Rodin, but her description is remarkably apt for understanding Hamilton’s photographically sculpted images and their varied surfaces. Some passages of the fabric appear marked by severe scratches while elsewhere sinuous creases resemble veins or nerves beneath the skin of the printed image, suggesting a larger circulatory or nervous system. The indentation of fingerprints also appears (fig. 6). Just as textured, large swaths of blank space have their own allure and effect; these marginal columns allow the mind to produce faces and figures through patterned creases. In fact, as one stares, the crumpled fabric seems to evolve and yield new forms, as hidden figures (or cast members) imprint on the curtain (fig. 7).

These haunting, visceral details summon Hamilton’s enigmatic abc • video (1994/1999). On display in the second gallery, in it, the artist explores, in her own words, “the relationship between written language and tactile experience.”[6] In the video, the artist’s fingertip erases the alphabet; the grooves of her fingerprint—reticulated cellular structures—absorb the ink of each letter. By playing the video in reverse, she delineates the alphabet, letter by letter, with her finger as stylus. But in still and moving • a cadence, the hands of gesticulating figures—frozen in motion—possess signifying possibilities. The magnified ligatures and serifs in abc • video transform into varied facial expressions and hand gestures of the apparitional figures (fig. 8).

Continuing to walk the perimeter of the room, visitors will increasingly get the sense of being inside a flatbed scanner or moving with the contours of Hamilton’s hand as she sculpts space and light. Viewing the fabric up close, multi-colored striations call attention to the processing and translation of images (fig. 9). At a distance, a grid of folded lines appears across the extent of the canvas, like guideposts or templates in document-scanning software. Sometimes colors bleed and streak while other times vertical strips of light from the scanner impart a high-tech aureole around select figures (fig. 10). At timed intervals, a video work is projected onto the canvas displaying the porcelain figure, Court Lady Holding a Sheng, thereby vivifying the image and transporting viewers to the sculptural environment of Hamilton’s scanner.[7] If she moved the eye or camera to the hand and therefore merged touching and seeing, then these scanning effects might be understood as electromagnetic currents pulsing between eye, hand, and mind. The variegated fabric evoking veins, nerves, and bodily conduits beneath a membrane reinforces this idea.

In 1968, art historian and critic Leo Steinberg coined the phrase “flatbed picture plane” in a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to elucidate his analysis of the work of Robert Rauschenberg and others. Later, in 1972, he fleshed out this idea in an Artforum essay, arguing that to best understand contemporary art of the day, a fundamental reorientation of painting had to take place. Instead of the vertical orientation of painting—and the Albertian treatise that had undergirded Western paining since the Renaissance—he contended American artists were repositioning the picture plane towards horizontality. Rather than a window onto nature, illusionism, and an ordering of the world through linear perspective, this new sensibility emphasized surface, flatness, layering, and the aggregation of pop culture and mass media. This horizontal orientation gestured towards a tabletop, the studio floor, or the flatbed of the printing press.[8] Hamilton’s new works take stock of this notion and expand the idea of the flatbed picture plane through her fundamental reorientation and flattening of terracotta and porcelain sculptures, layering these images on top of canvas, and superimposing video work onto these surfaces. Like dermatological tissue, she uses new technology to layer objects, images, and videos, rendering densely textured and allusive artworks while making use of the horizonal expanses of the curator’s desk and the conservator’s laboratory bench.[9]

This conceit of the expanded flatbed scanner extends to the exhibition catalogue as well, copies of which have been placed on benches in the gallery. The very first page appears as a blank scanner bed filled with visual static, recalling the empty vertical columns of the hanging canvases nearby (fig. 11). Leafing further, the glass flatbed gives way to rippling sheets of canvas, invoking several artistic forms at once: cloth-bound books, paintings, and curtains of a theatrical production.[10] Is it fair to characterize this hybrid artist book-exhibition catalogue as an image-laden script for the exhibition? If so, does that make Dr. Tannenbaum the stage manager of this elaborate and elusive production? After all, curating an exhibition with a contemporary artist (the director in this analogy) often feels akin to juggling the responsibilities of stage management to realize an artistic vision: communicating with all teams, arranging for props, overseeing everything backstage and onstage, etc.   

Beyond the first room, key precedents that inform Hamilton’s new work are arranged on one wall of Toby’s Gallery, helping exhibition-goers make connections across her oeuvre and enriching the overall experience. Type-written phrases make their way across the gallery walls via video projections (fig. 12), and encourage spectators to turn their bodies to see how words and images interact to create meaning. As these type-written phrases traverse the sheets of canvas, viewers get a keen sense of the texture of this now-lost mechanical form of writing. One detects the subtlety of the color of the ink, the raised bumps of the stamped letters, and the weave of the paper. In these moments, visitors might recall the heavily textured fabric in the other gallery, where the final printed image registers the marks of artistic touch. Like a writer caressing each letter or word in the composition of a text (present company included), Hamilton gingerly moves over the surface of her veil-covered figures with the scanner to construct a larger visual tableau. In both instances—her moving images with type-written phrases and her still images of figures—Hamilton calls attention to the labor-intensive shaping of words and images.

One of the most significant sequences in the exhibition involves still and moving • a cadence (video • draw) (2003/2025), where the stock motion-like movement of figures from the CMA’s collection collide and move past a series of interpuncts (•),the punctuation mark Hamilton has used in the titling of her video and sound work since the 1980s. Once commonplace as commas in Greek writing or positioned between words in Latin inscriptions, today they are more of a typographical flourish.[11] It is amusing to draw parallels between the dedicatory bronze inscriptions on Roman temples—where interpuncts abound—and the vinyl lettering of the exhibition’s title, as seen on the entryway to the first museum gallery (fig. 1). One might argue that both institutions are sites of a religious kind, where spectacle and theatricality activate multiple senses to transcend this terrestrial plane.

Hamilton’s strategic use of punctuation through the exhibition calls attention to the glyptic nature of language and images; round like floating buoys, interpuncts are an ancient form of grammar. Before the moving interpuncts eclipse the projected scans of figures in still and moving • a cadence (video • draw) (2003/2025), they recall a different mark, ellipses, thereby filling the room with the pregnant thoughts of the artist…waiting for them to evolve or take form (fig. 13). Once the marks and figures meet, the crèche figures in the sequence become speech units, utterances rearranged in a new, larger visual syntax—rendered figures of speech. Like the large voids of canvas, these instances of understatement and implication are some of the most fulfilling moments within the exhibition because they invite creative play. The work turns toward the listener-viewer-reader, extending the act of making and letting “the viewer imagine what may be left unsaid.”[12] If the show reaches us first through sound—the distal end of the human sensorium—then by the end we are intimately in touch with Hamilton’s still and moving images. Each one has been absorbed and imprinted upon the eye and mind with the possibility for retrieval in the future with the right call. Perhaps this is the visual equivalent for whistling: seeing one image activates memory’s boomerang effect, summoning a host of references from the chamber of the mind’s eye.

Anthony Huffman is a PhD student in the Art History Program at Case Western Reserve University, and a Fellow in CAN Journal’s Broadening the Conversation Program for Young Writers. Broadening the Conversation is made possible by gifts from Wallace Lanci, the Cleveland Foundation, and the George Gund Foundation.

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[1] Leslie speakers were developed in the 1940s to improve the sound quality of organs. Hamilton has used speakers in past projects, such as (corpus • sound) (2003/2006) and We Will Sing (2025). “History of the Leslie Speaker • with Tony Monaco,” YouTube, Official Hammon Organ, March 11, 2009, 4:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quE0ElIAwZE, accessed March 10, 2026.

[2] Each component of this multi-modal show is informed by Hamilton’s prior projects in photography, installation, and public art, including face to face (2001); corpus (2003) at Mass MoCA; ONEEVERYONE (2010–2020) at multiple sites; and aeon (2019) at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture (ISAC), University of Chicago, among others. For instance, still and moving • a cadence (2025) builds on aeon, where she scanned objects from the ISAC’s collection in order to form a vinyl canopy above The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, and, the picture is still (2001), where she moved a miniature surveillance camera across the surface of a photograph with her hand.

[3] This is an adaptation of an approach Hamilton devised with Duraflex for her decade-long portraiture project, ONEEVERYONE.

[4] Exhibition statement for Ann Hamilton: still and moving • the tactile image (December 14, 2025–April 19, 2026), The Cleveland Museum of Art, accessed on March 1, 2026.

[5] Rosalind E. Krauss, “Narrative Time: The Question of the Gates of Hell,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), 30.

[6] “(abc • video), 1994/1999,” Ann Hamilton Studio, https://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/videosound/abc_video.html, accessed March 13, 2026. Website text excerpted from Joan Simon, Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects (New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006).

[7] A sheng is a Chinese polyphonic free-reed wooden instrument.

[8] Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1972). First published in “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” Artforum 10, no. 7 (March 1972): 37–49.

[9] While Steinberg’s concept is useful for thinking through how Hamilton is playing with flatness and layering cultural moments, the hanging canvases of still and moving • a cadence are inescapably vertical and have a strong sculptural quality. As such, it would be productive elsewhere to integrate Steinberg’s writings with Krauss’s theorization of contemporary sculpture as laid out in Passages in Modern Sculpture, especially her discussion of the pictorial-sculptural tensions in Anthony Caro’s sculptures; see Krauss, 186–193.

[10] The bulk of the catalogue is comprised of Hamilton’s visual essay replete with images of objects scanned from museum storage. Aside from the objects already mentioned, this includes figures from ancient Egypt, Edo period Japan, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, Britain, and Germany. The book is a physical mass, a wedge of scanned images, a compressed, tangible record of the time spent handling, exploring, and coming to know these small-scale figures. Hamilton materializes the weight of these images. By flipping through the catalogue, whether inside the exhibition space or afterwards, the reader-viewer comes to embody the proposition she has staked out for this multi-media project: “seeing as a form of touch.” This phrase implies a more intimate mode of optical apprehension of the outside world, and a coopting of touch’s distinctive abilities for the eye. For example, through touch we can detect an object’s weight, temperature, and its internal rhythms and pulsations, if it is alive. The inside front cover of the catalogue features a diagram of gestures whose schematized design evokes an eye or monocular vision. The inside back cover includes two similar diagrams with voice and gesture—binocular vision. Fittingly, when the book is closed, gesture and vision frame the central pages of haptic images of historic figures.

[11] “Understanding interpuncts,” Microsoft 365, August 27, 2024, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/what-are-interpuncts, accessed on March 10, 2026.

[12]  Exhibition statement for Ann Hamilton: still and moving • the tactile image (December 14, 2025–April 19, 2026), The Cleveland Museum of Art, accessed on March 1, 2026.