Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo, 2009.

In her installation (Between Taxonomy and Communion), Hamilton deepens her explorations of the human body through language and its related structures of classification such as taxonomy, the scientific system of categorization used to define and understand the animal kingdom. The work consists of approximately 14,000 human and animal teeth—which Hamilton obtained from dentists, taxidermists, oral surgeons, slaughterhouses, and friends and associates—laid in rows across a steel table covered in a layer of iron oxide powder suggestive of blood. The red surface both foregrounds and threatens to soil the teeth, and it underscores the violence visited upon human and animal alike in the pursuit of knowledge.

credit

Scarface (1983), Dir. Brian De Palma