Gary Hill at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, NYC

Gary Hill: A name, a kind of chamber, two weapons and a still life
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
18 September - 30 October 1999

Barbara Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Gary Hill featuring five installation works in videomedia. Gary Hill, born in 1951, is one of the pioneers of video art. He completed his first Single Channel Video work in 1973, and began producing video installations as early as 1974.

In the catalogue from Gary Hill’s 1993 solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, curator Dorine Mignot states: “Gary Hill is an artist who is interested in the capacity of the various human language processes — be it spoken, written, gesture or body — their interrelationships and relationship to the outside world. He renders visible, as it were, processes of thought, of seeing, of communication (language). He makes them into a physical experience, into a combination of visual and spatial experience in time. The human body is a point of departure and return, in both his thoughts and work. The body as transmitter and receiver.”

Of the five works in this exhibition, Still Life, 1999, best illustrates Gary Hill’s consistent practice of utilizing new technological possibilities to extend the vocabulary of his work. It consists of over a thousand computer generated objects viewed from multiple angles throughout the space. The works in this exhibition, sometimes removed their monitor casings or projected onto table tops, use a sublime imagery, sound and space to communicate. In Reflex Chamber, 1996, Hill transforms the white cube into something akin to the internal chamber of a camera. Switchblade, 1998-99, and Crossbow, 1999 reference the human body, while Namesake, 1999, emphasizes the structure of language through repetition of name and image responding to each other.

In the artist’s own words, “I am primarily an image maker. Video embodies a reflexive space of difference through the simultaneous production of presence and distance. I think it has a visceral reality more encompassing than writing and still allows for meditation without falling prey to the image. And yet, although my art is based on images, I am very much involved in the undermining of those images through language.”

In 1998, Gary Hill was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. His recent solo exhibitions include: Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, OH. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; and Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. The artist lives and works in Seattle.

Barbara Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.gladstonegallery.com