07/31/2026
Last week at the inaugural Assembly Art Fair in Seattle was genuinely something. The fair set a new tone, intentionally small, gallery-led, inside the extraordinary West Canal Yards along Seattleās ship canal. We came home grateful and received many positive responses for the fair and our booth. We were especially excited to present a new series by Ann Hamilton, liber, shown publicly for the first time at Assembly 2026.
Ann Hamilton is one of the most significant artists working today. Known for decades of large-scale immersive installations, she has filled rooms with horsehair, pennies, iron oxide, walls of altered books, and attendants burning text line by line as they read. Her work circles, as she puts it, around a set of abiding questions: āWhat is touch? What is the reciprocity of touch? What is the experience of reading and language?ā
For years Hamilton used the flatbed scanner as an extended hand, pressing taxidermy birds, fabrics, garments, and objects from museum collections face-down against its surface to capture what touch alone knows. āIām almost a geologic excretion of everything Iāve ever read,ā she said. The scanner makes accumulation visible.
Liber is Latin for book, for bark, for the inner layer of a tree. According to Roman tradition, the living layer beneath the outer bark was the original surface of language, written on before papyrus, before vellum. The word giving us library, libretto, and libel began as something peeled from a tree.
Each work in the series opens a found book alongside a scanned image of an object drawn from a museum or private collection: a doll from Winterthur, a blue jay from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, silk and cloth and figures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Object and page held in the same plane, touch made visible. Hamilton then alters the book itself.
āFalling is the motion of the mind wandering, is the concert between the reader and the thing read. We disappear into it and it into us perhaps no differently than we are folded between cloth, hidden and revealed, touched. We become the book and the book becomes us, as do our houses, and our clothes, but these we mark with
