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13/9/2002

Gary Hill

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Barbara Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent video installation works by Gary Hill, some of which have never before been shown in the US. Hill is widely recognized for his varied inquiry into the conceptual nature of electronic media, particularly its relationship to writing, the voice and the body. Since his single-channel works from the early 1970s, Hill has worked with various media to investigate the nature of language and image, how they differ in time and space, and how they factor in the cognitive process. Since the beginning of the 1990s Hill has increasingly pursued large-scale projection with an ontological vein.

In this exhibition, Hill examines the threshold of where language begins and ends. Such works as Accordions (Belsunce Recordings, July 2001), 2001-02, address situations in which nonverbal communication, including gestures and facial expressions, acts as a surrogate for language. The work consists of five non-synchronized video projections with sound, each edited with segments of black/silence of varying lengths, to create a pulsating, rhythmic series of images. In the course of each video sequence, one person in a crowd catches the camera's attention; as the camera zooms in slowly on its subject, the imagery is interrupted by longer and longer segments of black to create an almost portrait-like photograph. The title refers to this telescoping, "accordion"-like movement in which a moving/contextualized image becomes a kind of portraiture in real time, and nonverbal dialogues are exchanged across fissures of time, distance, culture and language.

In another work entitled Language Willing, 2002, images of the artist's left and right hands move purposely about two projected circles of red and white floral patterns, respectively. As the circles rotate, the disembodied hands creep and crawl over the fabric, concealing and revealing flowers in the pattern. Hill coordinates these actions with a sound performance by Chris Mann, such that the rhythm and cadence of Mann's voice appear to generate choreographed gestures. Mann's voice takes on a physicality normally reserved for images, while the hands, with their autonomous, deliberate movements, seem to be speaking gestural poetry in an encoded sign-language. Hill shows us how the fluid properties of language and image can become interchangeable. As curator John G. Hanhardt concludes, "Hill . . . reconstructs the aesthetics of the video medium with his brilliant solution to the dilemma of being an artist in the fin de siècle: the placement of the body at the center of the process that links language to image, poetics to poetry, and the words we speak to the tongues we embody."

Gary Hill was born in 1951 in Santa Monica and now lives and works in Seattle. Last winter a major survey exhibition of Hill's work was held at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; in October 2002 it will travel to Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre pour l'image contemporaine, Geneva; El Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal; and Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be available

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6

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