Learning, Unlearning, Relearning: Meditating on America’s Past and Present

Gallery Purchase

In THE EQUAL AND INALIENABLE RIGHTS OF ALL, the central form is composed of the first sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. The artwork is a part of a larger project by Hamilton that relies on a concordance layout—a referencing method that alphabetizes principal and recurring words of a large document into an index, examining intersections of context while detecting the frequency of their usage. To create this work, the text was photographically transferred to copper plates and embossed onto damp paper blindly (without ink). When the paper dried, the printer dabbed a tarlatan cotton fabric pad into a pallet of ink and then lightly swiped it across the paper. The result is a delicate cloud of color that subtly evokes the specter of a body or soul as referenced in the text.