Sam Hamilton

Sam Hamilton, b. 1984, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, immigrated in 2014 to Portland, OR, USA, is a working-class interdisciplinary artist practicing across several interfolding creative, critical, material, and aesthetic trajectories through film, sound, writing, photography, objects, and painting. The recipient of the Art Foundations New Generation Artist Award, and a long standing sound artist for the internationally renowned Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, Hamilton has been a fulltime artist for the past decade, exhibited, presented and performed in over 25 countries across 6 continents in contexts ranging from Whitechapel Gallery in London to working inside the smoldering crater of an active volcano; from 5-month solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, to developing ecology based theoretical frameworks for sound art from make-shift artist laboratories in the Amazon jungle. Although not overtly political, their practice resonates with the premise that everything is political by virtue of its inherent and intimate existential entangled. Their practice, with an ever evolving nomadic center of gravity that periodically comes to fruition as concrete materialisations, is shaped through plurality. Crystallized vectors within confluential lines of inquiry. Gentle put poignant gestures teased from between dualities, complexity/simplicity, challenging/inviting, our shallow and deep modes of engagement. A meandering pathway through an overgrown garden.