Comfort Zones — Anthea Hamilton

Salon 94 presents Comfort Zones, Anthea Hamilton’s first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in the United States. Born and based in London, with Jamaican and Filipino parentage, Hamilton works from a simple proposition: origin need not determine destination. Her signatures — legs, boots, pumpkins, butterflies, bricks — return here, pushed somewhere new.

Techniques migrate between objects and materials change scale and assignment: pumpkins carved by hand in London and clad in leather; red boots surfaced in thousands of eggshell fragments through rankaku; leg chairs clad in hand-sanded aluminum and yellow brick. The absurdity comes partly from the disproportion between what an object appears to require and the labor she gives it.

The exhibition runs alongside two others across the gallery — A Chair Is A Nest, Is A Foot, Is A…, Hamilton’s curation of Gaetano Pesce’s archive on the first floor, and Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued on the third — forming a layered presentation across three floors, one artist’s practice read through another’s. An essay by Emmanuel Olunkwa accompanies the show.