Artist Talk: Sam Hamilton, Kalaija Mallery, and Sarah Cameron Sunde
Artist Talk with Sam Hamilton, Kalaija Mallery, and Sarah Cameron Sunde
Explore the concepts and process behind To Avoid Drowning, Become The Ocean
Saturday, June 27 | 2 PM | FREE
Sam Hamilton is a working-class interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa, New Zealand, of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent, who immigrated to Portland, Oregon (so-called US) in 2014.
After two decades of full-time practice across multiple fields and global regions, Hamilton's practice today resembles an ecology more than a discipline—a garden of fertile hybridisation, rhizomatic inquiry, and verdant displays of seasonal emergence. In blending political criticality with a playful and humane sensibility, and maintaining a tensioned balance between structure and messiness, and determination and ambiguity, Hamilton’s work is often ties together the simple with the complex.
Whether taking form as opera, painting, sound installation, photography, artist cinema, writing, ceramics, civic works, or social practice, Hamilton’s work has always been informed by the belief that art is a powerful critical modality through which real human cultural and material prosperity can be realised. And that the artist has an inherent responsibility to make good on that potential.
Hamilton’s work has been recognized by Creative Capital, The Ford Family Foundation Hallie Ford Fellowship of the Visual Arts, The Oregon Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowship, Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights award, and the New Zealand Art Foundation New Generation Artist Award.
Sarah Cameron Sunde is a New York based interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, conceptual and participatory public art. She investigates scale and duration in relation to embodiment, environmental crisis and deep time. Her work is part of an emerging field of art that is made on, in and with bodies of water in response to ecological change. It has been presented across the U.S. and on six continents. Sunde is a co-founder of Works on Water, a cultural leader with the World Economic Forum, and recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kalaija Mallery is the Executive & Artistic Director of The Luminary and the curator of To Avoid Drowning, Become The Ocean.