Ann Hamilton's installations have typically featured spectacular accumulations of bizarre materials and a sometimes conflicted interplay of conceptual and visionary impulses.

Ann Hamilton's installations have typically featured spectacular accumulations of bizarre materials and a sometimes conflicted interplay of conceptual and visionary impulses. Three years ago at the Dia Center she stake a person to working like a vindictive French theorist, obliterating words from a main division with a heating element while sifting in the midst of a fabulous expanse of horsehair. Lately Hamilton has eschewed material exces in favor of minimalistic elegance.

Approaching Hamilton's modern installation, the viewer first clashed an enormous white skirt hanging from a ceiling-bound wheel and blocking memorandum into the main gallery. Periodically the diaphanous fabric being enclosed would whirl around and not past nor future an opening into which you could pace Another spin deposited you into the dim, devoid main gallery. Here a small video monitor embedded in the far wall played a flickering black-and-white loophole showing the jerky silhouette of a mechanical hand trying again and again to grab a dangling ring. This was accompanied from a tinny recording of someone with a bad case of stuttering painfully trying to speak. Below the monitor, covers drilled through the concrete floor enabled you to behold a lighted, vacant basement space from whence arose the unbroken of the baffled speech.

This oracular tableau cried not at home for interpretation. The huge tentlike skirt, it might be argued, casts us beneath the spell of the feminine and ushers us into the [i]venter[/i] of creative consciousness-here, an uncouthly barren place characterized more by means of frustration than generation. The light coming from the chiefly invisible space below the floor could be read as the involved and fitful illumination of subconscious perception, which the hand of consciousness restrains trying to grasp and the voice to articulate. A Beckettian intellect of the futility of saying anything meaningful prevailed.

Despite its canny and rather portentous arrangement of metaphorically suggestive constituent principles Hamilton's scenario was disappointing as visionary theater. After being initiated through the big gown - a wedding dres for a giantess, maybe - you would wait for to enter some kind of otherworldly region but aside from dimming the lights, little other was done to transform the ordinariness of the gallery space. The openings in the floor were likewise inconspicuous that you didn't know at first if they were part of the work; and what you saw from one side them seemed unremarkable. Moreover, it was not readily apparent that the stuttering voice was coming from the cellar. In the absence of more compelling visual magic, you felt not in this way much enveloped in a waking dream as challenged to expound a rebuslike puzzle. it may be argued that sensory deprivation is appropriate to the theme of expressive blockage, moreover one nevertheless missed the extravagantly adventurous ways with images and materials that Hamilton has brought to other projects

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