Katherine Jemima Hamilton
class of 2022
about
Katherine Jemima Hamilton is a Canadian/American curator and educator born and raised on the traditional land of the Ligwilda'xw, Klahoose, K'omoks, and the Homalco First Nations on Vancouver Island. She is currently based on the land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in San Francisco, where she is pursuing a Dual-Degree Masters of Curatorial Practice and Visual Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She has also lived and worked in the territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples in Tkoronto, Ontario, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto and worked for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Art Metropole, and the U of T Art Museum, among other galleries.
Her research interests include feminism and technology, artist biographies, craft and ritual in contemporary frameworks, and unsettling practices for institutions.
Katherine’s Thesis
Sonic Imaginaries: Sound and Resonance in Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick’s Masks and Candice Hopkins’s Curation at documenta 14
Museums and exhibition displays consume the objects and cultures of the colonized, digest them, and regurgitate what is left into cultural institutions. The exhibition as a form of knowledge production could be changed so that cultural institutions no longer perpetuate stereotypes about colonized subjects and myths resulting from dominant singular histories. Sound is one way to address this pedagogical aporia. Using Candice Hopkins’s curation of Beau Dick’s masks at documenta 14 as its point of focus, this paper argues that curators can use sound and “sounding” as methodological frameworks to break the predominantly scopic method of viewing currently in place at most exhibition displays. To change the way visitors encounter objects, beings, and cultures inside the exhibition space, exhibition workers must find other imaginaries through which witnesses can be in relation with and to objects in our world. The sonic is one of these other imaginaries.