| About the Exhibition
Opening reception: Friday, June 4, beginning at 6 pm; live
music performance at 9 pm
The Deaths of Hamilton Fish is a musical project
that weaves together real and fictional characters into a
murder mystery that’s set in New York during the 1930’s.
The story will be told through film, music and artifacts in
the form of an installation in the gallery. The story and
songs are written and performed by Rachel Mason.
The Deaths of Hamilton Fish project is based on
a single historic coincidence. The research for the project
has been ongoing since 2005. When Mason was researching a
newspaper story on the date of Albert Fish’s electrocution
at Sing Sing prison, she discovered an article about another
Fish’s death in the same newspaper.
The story was written based on the lives of two men who died
on the same day. They were opposites in every imaginable way,
but had one thing in common; they shared the same name, Hamilton
Fish. One was the serial killer Albert Hamilton Fish, the
other, Hamilton Fish II, son of the Governor of New York State,
whose political family extends back to the founding fathers
of America. In this fictional depiction of events and personages,
Hamilton Fish II searches personal salvation by attempting
to find his murderous doppelganger.
The film was shot at, and near locations where the real events
occurred, such as an abandoned house in Sleepy Hollow, NY,
the haunted Untermeyer park, and the burial grounds and church
of the Hamilton Fish family.
Cast: Dmitriy Ivolgin, Jeff Lunger, Rachel Mason, Adrienne
Sneed
About the Artist
Rachel Mason is a songwriter, performer and sculptor. Trained
as a sculptor at Yale, her work finds autobiographical ties
to history as she inserts herself into the minds of characters
in sculpture and video. Mason has created guerrilla performances
ranging from a music performance on a window ledge facing
Broadway in which she descended into the arms of police officers,
to a rock opera with 30 dancers at the Park Avenue Armory.
She has recorded five full-length albums, and is included
on a compilation of music with Devendra Banhardt, Josephine
Foster, Diane Cluck and Kath Bloom. Mason performs solo, with
collaborators and at times backed by a full band, alternating
between costume changes. Dubbed “Marvelously Strange”
by Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice, Mason is a singer and
multi-instrumentalist playing drums, guitar, piano and accordion.
Mason’s sculptures and music have been featured in The
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Flash Art, Art News, and
Artforum.
Mason’s work has been shown at the James Gallery at
CUNY, University Art Museum in Buffalo, Sculpture Center,
Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, Circus Gallery, and she has
performed at venues including the Kunsthalle Zurich, The Park
Avenue Armory, Tonic, Art in General, La Mama, Galapagos,
Dixon Place, The Slipper Room, and The Empac Center for Performance
in Troy.
About the Gallery
Marginal Utility Inc. is a non-profit art organization that
presents the work of locally and internationally recognized
emerging and established artists. |
