PREVIEW: Allison Janae Hamilton-Celestine

Throughout her practice,  Allison Janae Hamilton draws on her upbringing in the rural American South, weaving themes of environmental justice, folklore, and mythology into sculpture, photography, and video work. Layering plant matter, landscape and figurative imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains throughout her work, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider notions of “Americana” and our relationships to land in the face of a changing climate, particularly in the rural American south. 

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery Archive

In her solo exhibition “Celestine”,  Allison Janae Hamilton turns her attention to the revelatory relationship of land and sky, of earthly and celestial. Drawing on her upbringing in the American South, Hamilton weaves land-centric folklore, regional mythology, and family history into sculpture, paintings, photographs, and films that address the social and political concerns of the rural South. Layering narratives derived from folktales, hunting and farming rituals, Black feminist writings, and Baptist hymns, Hamilton imagines epic myths within the rural terrain as a way of examining environmental justice, land loss, climate change, and sustainability. With the new work on view in the exhibition, Hamilton retrains her lens from the earth to the sky, imagining the rich landscapes that permeate her visual language in the vertical, extending not from sea to sea, but from soil to stars. Across new painting, sculpture, and film, Hamilton reinterprets the evocative visual motifs found throughout her practice, building upon her ever-evolving examination of place—and the untold stories of those places. Reimaging her embellished antique fencing masks in bronze, Hamilton frees them of their attachment to the wall, extending their vertical axis and adorning them with provocative symbols: flowers, antlers, and grapes. Undulating serpent ouroboroses—a motif Hamilton has previously employed in the form of alligators—frame a mirror in which the viewer can see themself, a subtle inversion of the way the nearby fencing masks obscure the face. Into the glass of the mirror, the artist has etched “BRILLIANT SKY,” a phrase borrowed from a painting by Mary Ann Carroll, the only woman among the group of late 20th century African American traveling landscape painters known as the Florida Highwaymen. Radiant and elusive, the stacked, repeated inscription sends the viewer’s gaze skyward. For a new series of small-scale sculptures, Hamilton cast the hands of the family and friends in white plaster with a ghostly, haint blue undertone. The gestures—a combination of prayer and figa, a symbol of divine protection throughout the African Diaspora—offer a direct link to the celestial. A suite of paintings and a new film bring the sky directly into the gallery. The trancelike, time- lapse film—titled “Celestine (Florida Storm)”— captures the sky over North Florida. A recording of  “Florida Storm”, a 1928 hymn written by Judge Jackson in response to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926—a text which has informed Hamilton’s work for years—plays on a loop underneath the astrophotography on screen. The meditative lyrics—performed in a rich, sultry voice by Florida native Candice Hoyes— provides the soundtrack to the moon and stars and clouds and treetops. With three large-scale paintings—an evolution of the her “Yard Sign” works on canvas—Hamilton imagines vast, swirling skyscapes, the gestural nature of the paint application allowing stars to twinkle. Painting in oil, Hamilton subtly references the brutal history of turpentine production—a harsh industry that kept primarily Black laborers across the Southeast in debt for decades. Together, the film and paintings serve as a reminder that the sky that the heavens, the weather, and everything in between cand ontains past, present, and future, unfolding ceaselessly above the land we inhabit. Hamilton’s practice has always been deeply connected to place—the artist was born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and spent time on her maternal family’s homestead in western Tennessee. Throughout Hamilton’s work, the topography of the land itself—the soil, the foliage, the water—has been a primary protagonist, even as mythic figures appear throughout. At the heart of Hamilton’s connection to the Earth is an ever-present tension, between the magnificent, mythic power of the natural world and the violence inherent to the landscape, both natural and man-made. With “Celestine” Hamilton draws her focus to the sky above—to hurricanes and heavenly beings and the remarkable beauty of the cosmos itself, heightening this ongoing tension. By bringing the celestial to the fore, Hamilton allows for new narratives to emerge, for the personal to take on a new element of the mythical.

Photo: Allison Janae Hamilton, Celestine (Florida Storm), 2025, Single-channel film with color and sound, Total runtime: 12:16, Edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proof, © Allison Janae Hamilton, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 30/1-8/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com/