Since 2008, UT's Landmarks public art program has brought dozens of works of art to the University of Texas, turning the campus into a 433 acre art gallery. The latest of those works is O N E E V E R Y O N E, created for the Dell Medical School by multimedia artist Ann Hamilton.
"The core of it is a photographic process," says Hamilton. "I had three different residencies here where I photographed people through a very particular process." Rather than staging her subjects in front of a backdrop, Hamilton had them stand behind a specially constructed screen, made of a thin membrane with a unique optical quality. "When you touch it, only the part that you touch is in focus and everything goes soft," says Hamilton. "So the material condition of how the photography takes place creates the tactical quality that these images have."
During her time in Austin, Hamilton photographed 500 people, creating some 21000 images. Those images will be presented in three different forms. "One of those forms is a series of baked enamel panels that will be installed permanently in the architecture [of the Dell Medical School]," Hamilton says. "Two of the other forms are something that's much more ephemeral, that can pass from hand to hand and circulate in indeterminate ways."
There will also be a 900 page newsprint book (including photos of all 500 participants) and a newspaper featuring writings about the project distributed in some of the area health clinics where the photos were taken, and also given away at the opening exhibition for O N E E V E R Y O N E. The photos will also soon be available for download at the project's website.
