AEON

Ann Hamilton, recipient of the National Medal of Arts and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, has created a new large-scale installation in the Grand Reading Room of UChicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library for her project aeon, affixing to the room’s massive glass dome a series of translucent images of ISAC's artifacts that she produced using a small flatbed desktop scanner and a handheld wand scanner. After several thousand years entombed underground, and nearly a century enclosed in the ISAC Museum's display cases, the ancient figures are illuminated and “animated” through Hamilton’s ethereal images.

In the fall of 2018, Hamilton spent a week in residency at ISAC imaging hundreds of objects, mostly from Iraq and Egypt. Her photographic process was unusual; rather than a camera, she used two kinds of scanners: a small early-generation flatbed desktop scanner and a handheld wand scanner, both designed with a shallow depth of field for documents, not three-dimensional objects. To use the flatbed scanner, Hamilton placed small figures on its glass platen and scanned. In contrast, Hamilton guided the wand scanner over the surface of the objects to produce unique images, in a hybrid of gestural drawing and lensless photography. The glass ceiling of the magnificent Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, with its state-of-the-art technology and award-winning, contemporary design, gives aeon its form. High in the dome and backlit by the sun, these ancient figures seem to stare down at the viewers, deriving agency from their lofty position.