Rotating quarterly, AMSET's Café Arts Series for Local Artists gives local artists the opportunity

to feature their artwork in a museum. 

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BRANDI HAMILTON: No Solid Surface

On View July 2 - September 6, 2020

Reception: Thursday, September 3 from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Tangential, 2018, C-Print, edition of 15, 12 x 12 inches, image courtesy of the artist  

Hamilton attended Lamar University for two years before enlisting in the United States Air Force. After serving for twenty years, she returned to her native Southeast Texas to pursue a BFA in Photography at Lamar University where she is currently studying with acclaimed artists and professors, Keith Carter and Prince Thomas. She uses lens-based media to produce silver gelatin and digitally printed images. Hamilton combines imagery and ideas from her military career in space and satellite technology and an M.A. in Humanities with the inherent influences from her small-town childhood.

“Once I left my military profession to pursue a creative life and career, I realized the twenty years spent in space and satellite operations for the United States Air Force would not fade from my consciousness so easily,” she said. “All that previous space training in orbital mechanics and radiofrequency communications floods my mind, wanting to be expressed, not as scientific and intelligence data, but as imagery of wonder and awe.

“In our current society, where the earth has become metaphorically flat again, space and all that it holds remains a frontier only a handful of humans have access to. In what might be the last days of space as unreachable wilderness, it continues to hold a sense of mystery for most of humanity.”

Hamilton’s exhibition, No Solid Surface, is inspired by her personal background and from space explorations of NASA, SpaceX and global entities.

“It surveys elements and compounds that are familiar and mundane, like rock samples beneath our feet, and recomposes them is if they are extraterrestrial or unfamiliar heavenly bodies,” she said. “The goal is to reimagine the oldest of materials in unfamiliar scenes to inspire a renewed sense of wonderment in the basic elements that surround us daily.”