Russell M. Hamilton
"Distances B-tween Us"
Elephantroom Gallery Chicago. 2026
"Distances B-tween Us" traces the spaces produced by migration, memory, belief, and historical rupture. Distances carried not only across geography but within the body itself. Through painting, textile assemblage, sculptural relief, and stitched surfaces, I construct figures and symbolic architectures that act as carriers of cultural, spiritual, and ancestral memory.
The title also reflects distances that can emerge within families and communities, spaces shaped by time, belief, circumstance, and the fragile work of staying connected.
Migration in these works is inseparable from the systems that regulate movement. Flag structures, numeric codes, administrative language, and measured divisions recur as visual forms, evoking territory, belonging, classification, and control. Referenced, fragmented, and reassembled, these elements suggest that identity is not only inherited but assigned, shaped by the political, spiritual, and bureaucratic frameworks through which our bodies travel.
Figures often appear as silhouettes or partially obscured presences, evoking identities reduced to records, symbols, or categories rather than fully recognized lives. Fabric, paper, tape, and salvaged materials operate as mnemonic surfaces. Stitched seams, layered skins, and weathered translucencies suggest identities assembled over time, not fixed, but continually becoming; a process. Totemic silhouettes draw from my African and Indigenous lineages, as well as Islamic traditions, positioning the body as a site where multiple inheritances converge.
Rather than narrating history directly, the works move toward residue, toward what remains after rupture: faith, lineage, memory, and quiet persistence. Distance here is not only separation but condition, a space where identities are reshaped, carried forward, and reassembled across generations.
Distances B-tween Us ultimately asks: What survives displacement? What persists when language fails? And how do the systems meant to define us create the distances we must learn to inhabit?