The large scale and more ephemeral installation work has been accompanied by an ongoing body of smaller works. Developed in parallel with the projects or after their completion, the artifacts shown here were inventoried by curator Joan Simon in Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006). The publication was designed by Hans Cogne. The following is an excerpt from the introduction.

Acts of finding, Hamilton pulls forward background moments during the process of creating her large-scale installation work, giving them a focus of attention and a presence beyond, yet related to, the sensory surround of the exhibition. Working with the material of these moments--discovered in the pages of books and during the shipping process alike--Hamilton develops print, video and object editions, bodies of work that constitute an archive of the threads of process, research, inventory and action that ultimately comprise the larger structure of form and language with which Hamilton works.

Many of Ann Hamilton's objects were made as components of site-responsive, architecturally bounded, temporal, theatrical sculptural projects. Others were made prior to or during the course of the public life of an installation, often by the performing presence, variously recognized by Hamilton as "an attendant, a figure, a tender." Of these types of objects made prior to or during the exhibition calendar of an installation, a number were recognized as objects within Hamilton's oeuvre after an installation had been dismantled—some of them many years later. In an economy of method and thinking, an example of another kind of tending, Hamilton keeps many elements of an installation after it has been disassembled and often draws upon them for new uses—revising, remaking, or recombining elements for subsequent pieces.

The newly recognized object serves as a trace of the temporal event, a relic, a condensation of the installation's tangible embodied history and memory. Whether presented anew as a single unit or as part of an assemblage of elements, these objects, as Hamilton notes, "have their own resonance" and "consolidate the relationships that were part of the larger work." See, for example, (privation and excesses), 1989, where metal chair, cloth, felt hat, and honey are re-used, but for which the hat is refilled with honey each time the object is shown to evoke the potential of the gesture that was key to the installation. For the installation, an attendant sat on the chair, cloth on lap, hat on cloth, and wrung his or her hands in the honey.

Yet other objects have developed out of possibilities or techniques offered in collaborative situations, such as,

• The Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, where Hamilton has made digital prints (reflections, 1999/2000; flectere, 2000; (phora · 1-12), 2005.
• Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, where she has worked extensively to make both prints based on photo negatives and also sculpture editions.
• The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, which served as the laboratory where the artist developed multiple video and sound works as part of her Resident Fellowship.
• The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, which fabricated components for many of Hamilton's installations as well as several independent works.
• Conversation with Marty Chafkin of Perfection Electricks, New York, who has designed and fabricated the electro-mechanical components in Hamilton's projects for several years—see (corpus · paper dropper) 2003; (phora · spinning sousaphone) 2005; and (phora · spinning speakers) 2005.
• Dialogue with graphic designer Hans Cogne facilitated the creation of the book included in the installation aloud that subsequently became the artist's book, Ann Hamilton: aloud.

Still another type of Hamilton object is made independently of an installation, though some of these objects may be related conceptually to contemporaneous installation ideas in process. For example, the stone-marked book of Untitled, 1992— that first object made independently of an installation—is related to components of two installations that Hamilton had been thinking about at the same time. In its effacing of some of the page's typographic marks, it is related to the pages of an eighteenth-century index of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus's sexual system of plant classification that Hamilton had punctured with pin-sized holes not only to trace the shape of the letter forms but also to obliterate the legibility of it as language. These pages, contained in a folio case and set upon a comptroller's table, were part of the installation "Ann Hamilton/David Ireland" (originally an untitled installation) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1992. The collective object in its entirety lived on after the fact as (Ann Hamilton/David Ireland), 1992, including not only the refigured pages and the table on which they were set but also the work's audio component, a female voice reading the genus and species list of Linnaeus's system.

Another ongoing aspect of Hamilton's project is her practice of finding tools and testing gestures to work them in a manner that animates inanimate forms. Two changes in her use of photography and video are important here, for in recent years Hamilton has used these media to "return time" to still images. Since 1999, Ann Hamilton has used a small pinhole camera made of a plastic film canister held in her mouth to take a picture. The long exposure of the pinhole which records the time of two people standing face to face extends into time the moment of "exposure." Her use of a tiny surveillance camera, by comparison, when moved by the hand over a photograph or object renders these subjects animate and dimensional in time. In both cases, one sensory organ is exchanged for another: the mouth or the hand serves as an "eye."

— Joan Simon

Text excerpted from Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006. Joan Simon.