IMAGE GALLERY
Dell Marie Hamilton’s
Emulsions in Departure
Dell Marie Hamilton’s early work, Emulsions in Departure is a film/photography interplay that uses the imprint of Hamilton’s fingers to provide texture and tone to the materiality of loss. Of longing. A fortunate accident while scanning images produced the series which has the visual effect of merging all of the elements into a series of photographic prints. Earth, wind, fire, and water converge here, as constitutive constructions of the Black diaspora separated by oceans, rivers, and seas. Hamilton’s abstraction is also a submersion, deepening the discourse of loss that carries itself across terrains in order to render grief visible even if it is only partially legible to others.
With the title Emulsions in Departure, Hamilton engenders an atmosphere of separation amid convergence, where mourning often resides. Referring to the work as “melancholy,” Hamilton’s use of texture and color creates a parallel engagement wherein an architecture of grief flows outward and provides a visual dispersal that coheres around the disparate subjectivities of Black life.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #11, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan,
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 30.25 inches. Image: 22.875 x 28.25 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #14, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan,
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 31 x 36 inches. Image size: 26.25 x 22 inches. Framed: 30.25 x 35 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #5, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 42 inches. Image size: 23 x 39.75 inches. Framed: 30.25 x 46.75 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #15, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 42 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #21, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan,
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 30.50 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #18, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan,
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 27.50 inches. Image size: 20x23.50 inches. Framed: 30 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #13, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo
Print size: 24 x 30.25 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #23, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 31.25 inches. Image size: 20 x 27.5 inches. Framed size: 26.75 x 34.375 inches.
Dell Marie Hamilton, Emulsions in Departure #12, 2016.
Medium Format Color Film/Unique Digital Scan, Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Bamboo.
Print size: 24 x 32.25 inches. Image size: 24 x 29.2 inches.
ARTIST STATEMENT: Emulsions in Departure
Within my art practice, my investigations of the natural landscape and seashore are driven by my intense need to map, measure and understand how memory is exquisitely formed at the dynamic nexus between location, temporality and the body. As a result, Emulsions in Departure posits the ocean as a central metaphor for hope, possibility, revelation and unruliness while simultaneously offering a performative negotiation between chance operations, wet-processes and digital photographic traditions. Through the manipulation of bodily imprint, color film, time, paint, surface, light and technology, Emulsions in Departure is meant to create generative and open-ended dialogue between the artist, image and viewer.
ARTIST BIO
Dell Marie Hamilton is an artist, writer and independent curator whose projects have been presented to a wide variety of audiences in New York at Five Myles Gallery, Panoply Performance Lab, and MOCADA. She has extensively performed in the New England area including the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, as well as at the Clark Art Institute where she became the first visual artist -in the Clark’s 64-year-history - to present a performance artwork in their galleries.
Working across a variety of mediums including performance, video, painting and photography, she uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of personal memory, gender, history and citizenship. With roots in Belize, Honduras and the Caribbean she also frequently draws upon the colonial and folkloric traditions of the region.
Her work has been reviewed in NKA: Contemporary Journal of African Art and her performance, “Blues\Blank\Black”, will be discussed in a forthcoming article by scholar Iyko Day, in the anthology AntiBlackness (eds. Moon-Kie Jung and Joao H. Costa Vargas, Duke University Press). Her most recent curatorial project, “Nine Moments for Now” was presented at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, and was ranked by Hyperallergic.com as one of 2018’s top 20 exhibitions in the U.S.
Hamilton is a recipient of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum’s 2021 inaugural cohort of the Charla Fund, a Ford Foundation-sponsored initiative that provides grants to Latinx artists. A frequent performer in the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Hamilton appears in her collaborative video, “When We Gather” which includes choreography and poetry by Okwui Okpokwasili and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.