Soil & Stars

Soil and Stars includes works shaped by the artist’s cultural and personal history that connect to larger universal stories of the land and human life. Featuring floral-embellished fencing masks that activate an other-worldly gaze into the celestial landscapes of Hamilton’s oil painting, the exhibition provides an overview of how the artist’s various mediums all connect through time and place.

Included in the exhibition is Hamilton’s most recent film, Celestine (Florida Storm). Filmed in the terrains of Northern Florida, the work gazes up into the brilliance of the night sky, inviting viewers to sense the land laid out beneath them. The film's soundscape carries an operatic rendition of "Florida Storm," a hymn commemorating the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. In response to the film’s meditation, Hamilton states, “You think about these histories of these natural disasters, and then combine those with these human-made disasters…how they land on top of each other, and how these storms are actually political things, and social things.”

While the artist has previously painted on wood and found objects, Toward the gates of Celestia represents her first works of oil on linen. The painting calls the viewer to the sky, where stars are abstracted into crosses in a range of blues, reds, blacks, and whites. The film and painting, in tandem, evoke the notion that the sky embodies a perpetual flow of time, highlighting the tension between the land and the celestial.

Included alongside the film and painting, are Hamilton’s photographs and vintage fencing masks, mediums both significant to her practice. Each mask is ornamented in varying materials — wooden flowers, upholstery tacks, and a rhinestone fringe. Inspired by an image of Black American WWII soldiers fencing, the masks began as props in her photographs and later became stand-alone artworks. They represent both the disruption of social hierarchy and a defense against societal expectation.

The artist’s deep connection to place comes from her past in Kentucky, Florida, and Tennessee. She leans into haunting and ancestral themes in her work, drawing on her experiences of Black womanhood and southern land. In Soil and Stars, Allison Janae Hamilton invites the viewer to traverse the parallel paths of the earth and the heavens, grounded and gazing upward.