“From June 11 – July 22, 2022”
Blanc Gallery is excited to present the work of Chicago-based artist, Jalen Hamilton, who has transformed the gallery into a beautiful installation of photography, ephemera, audio and text with his first solo exhibition, To Whom This Ground Belongs.
Centered on a collection of recorded conversations and portraits Hamilton has made with his family members, To Whom This Ground Belongs urges us to ask where we come from in order to know better where we aim to go. For Hamilton, this is not a neutral task. Pulling the title from a poem he wrote for a short film titled, A Celebration Of Us (2021), the provocation is simple: the land on which we live is contested, and we must challenge the dominant narratives wielded to disinherit African-American communities of their power and potential. Hamilton sees the work of archiving his family’s history, image and stories as part of a recuperative process to create scripts from which new futures might be constructed. From behind the eyes of beautifully rendered photos of men, women and children spanning generations and geographic locations, you are prompted to look deeper, to get closer and to listen to what these people have to say. These are images of black family that remind you of the exceptional breadth of the Black experience while simultaneously invoking the many untold and unheard stories that link Black folk together across time and space.
It is important to point toward the breadth in Hamilton’s practice (he straddles the lines between poet, photographer, filmmaker, storyteller, educator, conversationalist) , because it is the effortlessness with which he moves between and beyond categories which best characterizes the potential of his work. Never content to settle into a singular position and always seeking to extend the boundaries of his practice, Hamilton’s work is rooted in and through exploration. Whether that means he is probing at the edges of photography’s potential or asking you a question that cracks open a way for you to better understand yourself, his mind exists in a space that refuses the limitations of containment. In To Whom This Ground Belongs, this inquisitive disposition has taken Hamilton on a journey of family excavation. He enters the scene as family archivist and urges us all to think about how we will preserve the rich and layered stories of our own families. For Hamilton, we occupy an important location in the unfolding narratives of those who have come before, and those who will come after us. We are the bearers of now, and we have a duty to narrate our present as a form of preservation, legacy, respect, education and liberation. With this body of work he asks us to sit at the center of our own narratives and understand ourselves and our families as future ancestors with the ability to structure and restructure the futures and presents we have inherited.
To Whom This Ground Belongs is curated by Faith Overall.