MEGAN HAMILTON - EXPOSURE emerging photographers showcase

Rowley is a collage series composed from found vintage imagery of cowgirl style pinup and pornography and 35mm film photographs taken around southern Alberta. Combining these two sources juxtaposes the past and present and explores the fantasization and commercialization of the wild west. This series consists of 10 works, each 9x12 collaged onto watercolour paper. The romanticized view of the wild west is exemplified through colonial expansion, exploiting the land and bodies for profit. Outlaws, Cowboys, and gun slingers were common tropes of film and media when displaying the west. The old wild west is a cultural fantasy we’ve inherited, as Alberta’s current landscape is dotted with remnants and ghost towns whispering secrets of the past and places forgotten and abandoned. The obsession with cowboy culture, brought fetishistic representations of women as cowgirl pin ups in vintage magazines and pornography, which is similar to the fetishistic lens and treatment of the land, which was also occurring. Using collage as a tool to subvert the original pinup imagery, the process of altering, fragmenting, and combining past images and present images display the destructive relation in which the land and women were consumed, used, and exploited, and the aftermath and remains we inhabit today. This work reflects on parallels between colonialism and feminism, with a focus on ideas around land use and politics, the ghosts of the past that continue to linger.

BIOGRAPHY

Megan Hamilton is an emerging multidisciplinary artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta University of the Arts on Treaty 7 land known as Calgary, Alberta. Her practice incorporates a variety of mediums such as photography, collage, painting, found object installation, projection, and video, to convey and explore ideas of death, grief, trauma, liminal spaces, memory, identity and the body. Concealment and manipulation/mutation, are reoccurring techniques used to create other-worldly places of the uncanny and unseen, embedded with emotional residue. Questioning borders/boundaries between the tangible and intangible, between here and elsewhere. Megan’s art is a process of becoming, of transformation, a process of trying to understand, a process of learning, healing, of growing. She has shown her work in numerous group exhibitions including at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and Marion Nicoll Gallery. Megan was recently an artist in residence with the Hear/d Residency and received a Board Of Governors Graduating Award from the Alberta University of the Arts.