Allison Janae Hamilton: Passage.

Allison Janae Hamilton’s video Passage. (2016) is projected onto a single wall in a continuous loop. Although now based in New York, her work is anchored in the South, from the sweltering swamps of North Florida to rural western Tennessee, home of her maternal family’s farm and homestead. Interweaving non-linear footage, the work utilizes folklore, family stories, and myths to capture a murky dreamlike puzzle, incomplete after years of attempting to solve the entirety of the picture. Like an epic family memory that floods and re-floods, spilling over all in its way. There is a palpable unease as a macabre figure wearing animal mask creepily carries the remains of an armadillo. Women’s clothing is separated from their owner’s bodies, strewn about and rustling in the old pine trees. Does the tension of this nothingness comes from not fully knowing where or how these women disappeared? Are these ghosts victims or did they escape this balmy environment of their own volition in search of greater opportunities? In a flash, we view a group of women gathered in a circle around their bibles, a ritual of rural life. Perhaps these women once wore those dresses of big aspirations and family obligations and have kept them here to grow older? Perhaps it is a dream that is happening in the past and future simultaneously, an imagined world of what once was and could have been.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website