Film still from Apple Pie, by Sam Hamilton
Sam Hamilton: APPLE PIE
November 14, 2017 - February 11, 2018
AV Gallery
Completed in 2017, APPLE PIE is a ten-part creative inquiry into the relational intersections between astronomy and the evolution of human agency. Adopting a structural architecture that’s loosely modeled off our solar system – the film functions as a kind of complex structure, or conceptual ecology through which to construct your own associative narratives and assumptions. A film that mirrors the messy duality of existential reality itself, oscillating between known and unknown engagements, between anchors of meaning amidst an ocean of chaos. The somewhat anti-authoritarian/de-authoring approach to this alternative rendering of the project is an attempt to give the material some sort of intrinsic existential autonomy; free to follow its own evolutionary agency within the relational architectures of matter, space, time, and energy.
Produced over three years, the film was shot on super 16mm film in Aotearoa NZ, Samoa, and a remote mountaintop astrophysics observatory in the high plain desert in North America and significantly features the involvement of Samoan dance artist Ioane Papali’i.
APPLE PIE is the most significant project by Aotearoa NZ artist Sam Hamilton to date and was recently the central piece of a significant 6-month long solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, USA, titled ‘Standard Candles’ where Hamilton has been residing for the last 2 years.
About the Artist:
Sam Hamilton is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand currently residing in the US.
Hamilton’s hybridized, inter-disciplinary and auto-didactic artist practice functions like an ecology drawing influence, materials, and methodologies from experimental music and sound, philosophy, film, sculpture, performance, science, and literature.
He has been the recipient of the Circuit THICK CINEMA Commission 2017, The Oregon Regional Arts & Culture Council Professional Development Grant, a Wallace Arts Trust grant, Arts Foundations New Generation Artist Award 2011 and more. He has had work shown at the Portland Art Museum, Christchurch Art Gallery, Wellington City Gallery, ARTSPACE, The Brick Bay Sculpture Park, ISSUE Project Room NYC, PANEL LA, Disjecta and more.