Description |
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Jun. 10 - Aug. 14, 1994. The seven installations in the exhibition gave a clear sense of the artist’s installation of the conceptual potential and technical adaptability of the video medium. Hill used interrelationship of language, visual perceptions and meaning.
Informed by writers, philosophers, and literary theorists such as Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gary Hill’s influential work deeply investigates the complex relationship of visual art to language. His first works dealing with the intertextual nature of image, sound, speech, and language emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Language, when transmitted through writing, sculpting, and drawing, always emanates from the body through gestures and actions of the hand. Hill’s first experimentations with the medium of video explored the synergetic connection of eye and hand, and body and video, by attaching a camera to various parts of his own body. The resulting works expressed the difficulty of communicating a sense of the physical body in video, bringing to the fore a fundamental theme in Hill’s work: disembodiment.
Hill’s interactive installations alter the viewer’s experience of space and time by creating a powerful connection between the body - the nervous system, the brain, one’s sense of vision and capacity for speech - and electronic media: computer and video technologies. A bombardment of sensory information pushes the viewer towards the outer extremes of consciousness and perception. The artist considers video the most receptive, flexible, and deep-reaching mirror of consciousness. At the heart of Hill’s video works is a dual examination: an examination of the limits of cognition— what we know or think we know, what we say, and what we feel— and of the capacity and potential of his materials to induce profound inquiry. |