While Rome is the eternal city, Venice is a city outside of time. Though the tourists may lope by the hundreds across St. Marks Square, scattering its hoards of pigeons skyward, the city remains unperturbed, petrified in its golden light. It is as if one is never truly there at all, as if in visiting the city one becomes a ghost, an apparition that flits across its surface like moonlight on the Adriatic. One becomes uncertain if it is the city that is an anachronism, or oneself.

A similar feeling pervades Brenton Hamilton’s works of the past ten years, which despite having their creative genesis in Rome, where he was inspired by an engraving fragment tucked into a notebook he purchased in a local market, and their physical origins on the coast of Maine, where he has worked for years to perfect the esoteric processes that he uses to make his images, could be said to have their spiritual home in the City on the Water. Like that enigmatic city, his works are suffused with an uncanny and melancholic feeling of the anachronistic, a sense that they are not at home in the present, but yet linger as signifiers of some unnamed loss.

Most of Hamilton’s works are produced using the cyanotype process discovered in 1842 by the English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. Prepared on paper using a mixture of ultraviolet-light-sensitive chemicals that can subsequently be exposed in the sunlight, the process takes its name from the striking Prussian blue color of the finished print. One of the first notable uses of the process was that of English botanist Anna Atkins, who created cyanotypes of plant specimens as illustrations for her 1843 book British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs. Her image making process, which consisted of simply laying her specimens on sensitized paper and exposing it in the sun, resulted in the creation of a ghostly archive of underwater flora—x-ray silhouettes afloat on grounds of azure, as if still ensconced in their native habitats.

Hamilton uses a similar technique, cobbling together fragments of anatomy textbook illustrations, botanical drawings, and images of classical sculpture and Renaissance-era painting, which the sun burns in negative onto his carefully prepared paper. Often times, though, the hue of Hamilton’s prints is markedly darker than Atkins’s watery blues. They are an inscrutable color, one that sometimes teeters on the edge of black, redolent of a moonless sky at the back end of dusk, or the ocean depths where sunlight cannot reach. It is a perfect ground on which to construct his fractured tableaux, which hint at unseen forces—in history as well as within the self—that are both wondrous and terrifying.

Hamilton’s work is full of shattered and misshapen bodies, jumbles of limbs and misplaced viscera, hydrocephalitic heads and backwards torsos. They are monstrous figures, which play counterpointally against the graceful, Platonic bodies whose world they cohabitate, and from which they themselves are often constructed. Unlike their idealized counterparts, these twisted homunculi are embodiments of a fragmented self, ciphers for a psychological model that moves beyond Freud’s hierarchy, and with it the province of Surrealism, in favor of the destabilized ego of Jacques Lacan, whose pieces we vainly try to collage into a semblance of a whole.

Time, too, seems to be fractured in Hamilton’s work, not the least because his willfully anachronistic working methods confound the contemporary hunger for ever-faster image production and consumption. As images, they seem to be exquisitely arranged sweepings rescued from the dustbin of history, shards of the past that, though resonant, remain forever incomplete. It is as if history—its coherence, its grand narratives—is in danger of falling victim to the same entropic forces that work against the ego’s centripetal pull.
But, for all the historical upheaval and psychological and corporeal dissolution alluded to in his works, Hamilton manages to maintain a delicate equipoise between chaos and beauty. As a result, his works seem at a remove from the world they address. Like Venice, they have a feeling of being in the world, but not of it.