excerpted from k.j. hamilton: the empty mirror

conrad migore, isabelle fénéon, phillipe yaya, 2062

exhibition catalogue, hardcover, 248 pages

ISBN 978-1-XXXXX-XXX-X

k.j. hamilton carried a tenuous sense of themself as an artist. they had little functional use for the label and spoke little about their private efforts, even during the peak years of 2025-2034. hamilton suffered no avatars and maintained little to no online presence. few photographs of them are known to exist. a longtime project manager in chicago’s department of public health, their coworkers were shocked to learn upon hamilton's passing that they had been a photographer of some considerable skill and output.

among the last of hamilton’s most intimate series—captured months before they, too, finally succumbed to the viral outbreaks so common in early 21st-century america—was a series of ‘subjectless portraits.' the viewer was shown an empty chair or position around which hamilton would leave traces of presence. one such portrait—affectionately named portrait of yesterday’s human—finds an empty chair sitting at the artist’s dining room table. a lit marijuana cigarette simmers in the ashtray. a ring of coffee lingers on the unvarnished tabletop where a cup was freshly removed. unidentified magazines tower and stack themselves in the background. on the table, in soft focus, is a thumbed copy of the collected stories of diane williams (2018). sunlight comes in through the open window, so blinding you can't see the scene outside. someone shred the lace curtains in half, leaving behind jagged ends and wisps of thread, as though torn by hand. moldy beams of wood board up the eastbound window, a common and even fashionable trend for a spell in the 2020s when a novel coronavirus was erroneously rumored to have gone airborne. bundles of sage, lilys, and dried hydrangeas hang from the ceiling. a single stick of incense burns atop a bookshelf. the smoke drifts listlessly into the orbit of a nearby ceiling fan.

the portraits provoke questions of both absence and identity. scholars and contemporaries have offered up any number of potential real-life “subjects”: hamilton’s partner of twenty-three years had passed the spring prior, their mother the winter before that. hamilton's portraits are nowhere constrained by the fact of death. estranged from long time friends and family, perhaps the subject was themself.

but unlike other self-portraitists, hamilton leads us to consider the insuperable divide between artist and subject, between seeing and being seen, being presenting and absenting our bodies. for in the lingering remains of life and the dilapidations of hamilton’s apartment, perhaps we are to believe that no such subject exists. the space, after all, is not unlived in. rather, there is simply nothing left to live the life it so desperately signals.