I was instantly drawn to the Siberian Rubythroat. It must have been the vibrant red flash of exposed underbelly that first caught my eye, but it was the bird’s placement that focused my attention, a diminutive creature adrift in a mauve fog. The Rubythroat is just one of 200 animal specimens that have been scanned, printed in multiple, and hung in a mosaic of thick newsprint pads covering the Henry Art Gallery’s walls. Amid the mashed fur pelts and abstracted hoofs, claws, and beaks of the unruly ecosystem on view, something about the Rubythroat’s smallness—a ghostly thing to be cradled in hand—compelled me to reach up, take tentative hold, and slowly tear the bird’s portrait down from the wall.
This exhibition by Ann Hamilton, The Common S E N S E, is a constellation of objects, images, textures, and sounds—a multisensory splendor that invites visitors to look, touch, and listen as they wind circuitously through the museum’s galleries and halls. The menagerie is just a single component to Hamilton’s multifaceted production. The exhibition weaves text and textile, fur and fashion, in a way that facilitates new encounters with common things. The installation plays with the conventions of museum display, going beyond simply upending expected narratives to address the audience and promote tactile participation as a generative aspect of the work. Hamilton explores the intimacy achieved through collectivity, provoking viewers to reexamine the familiar and question how it feels—how we feel—to exist in the world.