Guest contributor Kurt Piazza provides this review of artist Allen Hampton’s latest work. -MV >>

Installation view of work by Allen Hampton.

“I feel like I’m not able to connect to most people. Eventually they disappoint you,” says Allen Hampton. I met up with Hampton recently to talk about his new work, which deals primarily with loneliness, ennui and fear. As an artist, he approaches these subjects with stunning sensitivity, shadowed by a sense of menace.

I first met Hampton about four years ago while serving as curator at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo; he was in his first year of graduate art school at the University of South Florida. His work was gritty, yet incredibly detailed and full of complex, layered imagery and text. I was drawn to it almost immediately and have followed his progress since. Hampton graduated just over a year ago and has been developing a new body of work, which he showed recently at Three04, an alternative art space in Tampa. His new work, consisting of paintings, drawings, sculptures and video employs—among other things—found objects, recurring imagery of wolves and self-portraits. The work feels lonely and disengaged, yet when experienced all together, there is a sense that something dreadful or cataclysmic is about to happen.

Allen Hampton. Untitled (Birth of the Ataxian Mongrel), 2009. Pig’s blood on paper, 30″ x 44″.

Untitled (Birth of the Ataxian Mongrel) illustrates this sense of dread. Drawn entirely in pig’s blood, the image is a self-portrait of the artist, his head thrown back. A wolf’s snout emerges from the artist’s throat, and a gush of text emanates from the wolf’s snarling mouth. The image is not as gory as it is disturbing, and rather than depicting this transmogrification with superfluous blood and gore, the medium of pig’s blood alone communicates a gruesome metaphorical struggle between the artist and the monsters within him.

Another haunting piece that explores the notion of impending fear is a single channel video, Clenched Tight in the Maw of the Great Ancient Ennui. Hampton presents the video using only found objects, including a vintage 1970’s Sony television monitor and stereo receiver and large, black aviation-like headphones. The piece again presents wolf imagery, this time in video form. A pack of young wolves gather restlessly in a patch of tall, dry grass. They open their jaws as if yawning, giving off a discordant harmonic cry, and appear as if they are about to attack at any moment. Their agitated behavior transfers to the viewer, and the sense that something menacing is about to happen manifests once again.

One of the more affecting pieces is a diptych of Polaroid photographs titled, Barriers: Two. The image is a photograph of the artist, appearing unyielding and reticent. He has a longish beard and almost canine-like facial hair, strewn with small flowers. He wears a handkerchief tied round his neck and a baseball cap pulled down low as he stares directly into the camera. This is paired with an image of a security sign affixed to a chain-link gate, indicating the presence of a guard dog. The sign is devoid of text, just the image of a disembodied dog head snarling at the viewer with fury. As in Untitled (the pig blood drawing), this fascinating arrangement of images presents a metaphorical struggle between the artist and his inner demons. Hampton approaches this notion with restrained sensitivity in both the intimate scale of the work and the juxtaposition of images, yet there is something unnerving in both its context and the way the artist depicts himself. One is never quite sure who is dominant, artist or beast, and the viewer thus finds himself in the middle of a visual conflict between the two.

Working with the concepts of struggle, duality and conflict, Hampton creates artwork that explores very personal themes through gruesome, ominous and metaphorical imagery. As a person, he struggles to connect to the outside world, but as an artist he successfully communicates to that world, which never quite seems to understand him. Through his compelling images and sensitive approach, he reveals his vulnerability and exploits his fears without restraint. As viewers, we are compelled to stare back at those fears and discover a threatening presence we perhaps never knew was there.

For more information about Allen Hampton, go to allenhampton.net.