Watch the Gap: The Shock of Application and Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Main Menu

The Cover Up

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Of course the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, like the story behind any of Hamilton’s artworks, is really a (tattle) tale about the nature of “truth”—and how we go to great lengths to cover up our true nature. It’s always a story about complicity. Social ceremony and political correctness, the artist maintains, are timeless strategies deployed to manufacture a conspiracy of silence (Zerubavel, 62), exactly like the one that is so carefully constructed through denial in Andersen’s story. (Zerubavel, 58), Hamilton doesn’t play into either, though. Even when she mimics these strategies by cheekily (and painstakingly) covering a vintage 1950s United Nations helmet, with its unique blue tint, with green duck eggshells (Green on Blue: Shell Shocked, 2012) or defused hand grenades with baby-blue robin eggshells (Still Life with Fruit, 1996), she sardonically reminds us that the innermost closeted self is made safe only by an outer anchorage of convention and respectability—indeed a façade.

Hamilton warns us that the façades we create—as beautifully seductive as they are— are as tenuous as the eggshells she crushes, or, in the face of nationalism, that the territories we defend by means of war are just as fragmented as those crushed eggshells.

Fully willing to admit to her own predilection for destruction, she drops one of her pretty little bombs on us.

Even if her weapons are defused, the message she creates by altering their appearance is pretty explosive. Call it a war on our conscience.


Works Cited

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  1. A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing Emelie Chhangur

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  1. Works Cited Emelie Chhangur

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  1. The Lie

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