Chiara & chair 2004

Richard Hamilton made this as a mixed media on paper - a collage of flat planes and sharp converging lines. I can almost feel Hamilton mapping out the space, figuring out how everything fits together like a puzzle. I wonder what was going through Hamilton’s head as he was making this interior? Maybe he was thinking about how we construct our perception of reality from fragments. The planes are like memories stacked on top of each other. The woman vacuuming seems so out of place in this carefully constructed setting. Is she a dream, a fantasy, or just another object in the space? Hamilton probably wanted us to question our own assumptions about what is real and what is not. The perspective lines pull us into the scene but also remind us that it's all a construct. I see echoes of earlier experiments with perspective in the early Renaissance. It's like one big conversation that echoes across time.