Weatherford: April 16 to  September 5, 2021, Curated by Bill Arning and Ian Berry
Stevens: March 26 to June 9, 2021, Curated by Brandee Caoba and Lucy Lippard
1606 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe NM 87505
sitesantafe.org 

Two exhibitions at this year’s Site Santa Fe present, respectively, an extensive, career retrospective of Mary Weatherford and, in the new side gallery, (SITELab 14,) a two-room glimpse at the career of May Stevens, a local resident for the last twenty years of her life. John Elderfield, speaking on a video at the Gagosian website on Weatherford, who is represented by that gallery, cautions against succumbing to the tyranny of stylistic influence: “as these stylistic things get absorbed, in a way it doesn’t matter…where they come from, all art comes from something.” This mildly disingenuous statement suggesting we check our modernist or post-modernist critical attitudes at the door, is nonetheless something I found helpful in viewing the early careers of each artist. It’s more problematic, however, with their mature works.

A couple of early Weatherford “target” paintings, while accomplished on their own terms, are very much par for the course with this genre, making attempts by the show’s co-curator Ian Berry in a press walk through at Site Santa Fe to suggest temporal and arboreal associations feel belated. Much more convincing for me, in this show of large, amply spaced canvases, is the group of works starting in the 1990s that incorporates imagery, often silkscreened, on the same canvas as a quasi-color-field background.  Of this type, Her Insomnia (1991) and 5:00 a.m. (1992) form a night and day pairing at the far ends of a long gallery. Both feature the vertical, thorny stalks of silkscreened plant photographs and there is a gentle beauty to each reminiscent of effects achieved in Gerhard Richter, Jules Olitski or Donald Sultan.  In the same room hangs Night and Day, (1996) one of several paintings executed on jute, at a distance a dead ringer for Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs of embracing or hand-holding couples. There is even Munch’s obligatory full moon albeit minus the phallic reflection.

Moving deeper into the exhibition we encounter what are generally considered Weatherford’s ground-breaking works and a shift to figuration in a series of paintings of rocks and then caves done when Weatherford returned to art school for her MFA at Bard College. This surely entailed a commendable degree of humility on the part of an artist who at this stage in her career (2006) was carving out prestigious solo exhibitions with clockwork regularity. I get the sense that these paintings afforded Weatherford a new formal syntax, redolent of Cézanne –she never seems to directly utilize Cubist architectonics and sleights of hand – that comes with working from direct observation.

What has really catapulted her to international acclaim and the attention of Gagosian, is surely her series of “stained“ gestural abstract paintings. These typically include slender custom-made neon tubes that traverse the surface of canvases in loose harmony with their attendant electrical wires, both partners typically meeting at floor level to slink along the baseboards to their origins in a white transmitter box decorously aligned off one corner of the canvas. These began in 2012, the result of several visits that made up a teaching residency at CSU Bakersfield in which Weatherford underwent an epiphany of sorts inspired by the prevalence of neon decorating the facades of restaurants and factories. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on an artist whose “Bakersfield Project’ yielded sublime paintings from a locale, that inhabitants of the San Joaquin Valley – I was one myself for twenty-five years – considered a byword for car theft and industrial scale agricultural blight! Thus a question posed by the presence of neon  in this recent instantiation, is whether it functions as it might in a Rauschenberg “combine”, transforming the quotidian into something, that by virtue of mimicking painterly signs or marks, achieves a putative sublimity, and is thus subsumed into a larger creative vision; or whether a more deliberate contrast is sought between the mundaneness of neon and the lyrical ferment displayed on canvas after canvas with appreciative side-glances at Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.

I’m uncertain on what level to absorb these paintings, a confusion which Elderfield might be keen to absolve me from. I share his ennui with over-conceptualization of art, and the constant search for the next youthful font of true originality — generally now emblazoned with signs that the artist is up on the latest in digital gizmos or the newest fad in emojis — a search which seemed to have largely petered out sometime in the mid-1980s. Might it not be possible to replough the under-tilled pastures of earlier exemplars, who opened up alluring new territories –Picasso was, in this regard at least, supremely generous – and explore their potential in the patient afterglow of their timeliness, a luxury that Cézanne, Kandinsky, or Jackson Pollock did not afford themselves? And yet I worry that gestural abstraction, color field variations included, has perhaps become too much of a monoculture to yield a lot in this regard.  I am ready to be proved mistaken and Weatherford seems well positioned to do that.

Site Santa Fe inherited this exhibit from the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and has perhaps not landed the cream of Weatherford’s fresh crop, like her recent series of “Railyard” paintings that really do seem to stop us in our tracks. I also think it’s inevitable that an artist who works intuitively, canvas on the floor, should produce an uneven output.  There is much to admire in that; freshness at a premium, working from an authentic core of fallibility, no pat formulae, etc. Munch might be the exemplar in this. In Lovely Day, the artist seems in earnest about the title, inviting narrative association and, beyond the fresh major key chromatic triads can be glimpsed the suggestion of an outdoor gathering of at least three seated or reclining women forming a broken carmine triangle near the picture’s center. These forms are interspliced with ultramarine angular animal or male figures who pay a kind of frolicsome attendance. My question remains whether the tenuous links provided by canvas or exhibition titles and the neon add-ons give us enough to work with, open-endedness notwithstanding, so that gestural abstraction can occupy territory normally reserved for monumental narrative painting, but without the attendant representational slog.

These are accomplished, nuanced paintings, where the skein of paint hangs tantalizingly between a state of floating upon – or immersion within – the raised linen or jute weave that receives it.  The relationship between controlled color saturations and the physical saturation of pigment into the woven surface is something to behold.  Nonetheless the naivety implied in attaching neon strips to gestural color field paintings seems a tad disingenuous. When interviewed, Weatherford generously acknowledges her forbears in the use of neon, but she has perhaps not paid sufficient painterly dues on the canvas, where it counts. Dan Flavin is the first who jumps to mind, but Weatherford’s electric affinities are closer to Arte Povera and the poetry wrested from neon by Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Lucio Fontana. It is almost as if the generosity of interpretation granted the viewer has been afforded too much license in Weatherford’s case, as if the Maenadic wave of energy that yields the painterly saturations, instead of suspending, somewhat blurs her critical sense.

May Stevens, arguably in her heyday in the mid-1970s which saw her involvement with the feminist “Heresies” magazine, featured in a documentary at an adjoining room at Site, produced her best-known paintings, those depicting “Big Daddy”, during that period. It is hard to escape the notion that this level of notoriety remined elusive for the remainder of her long and productive career. Did she crest too early? Exempting her responses to the death of Rosa Luxemburg lasting from 1976-1990, a topic previously addressed by Kathe Kollwitz and R.B. Kitaj, and represented here by Death Squad, (1986) her work since the mid-1980s is her most refined and expressive. The proviso being that works with weighty political and historical subjects are not preferred over those with more elusive content.

Green Field, (1988) is a triumph. The central ghostly figure of May’s mother reconciles the skein of painterly marks which hover deftly between doing their own painterly thing and describing a landscape field at an inclined plane to that of the picture surface. Sea of Words, (2004) a title taken from a canvas not on display, gives the central metaphor for a group of giant acrylic canvases that were Stevens’ focus through the early 1990s. The pictorial dynamics again fuse color field elegance with gently inclined perspectives. We view ghostly boatwomen afloat upon and enmeshed within a slippery veneer of elegantly cursive words that also function as the lit crests of rivulets and runnels. As the century ends these canvases deepen in color and subtlety with the vertical accretion of drips reasserting painterly prerogatives over gentle descriptive imperatives. Her Boats, (1996-7) Galisteo (Creek, New Mexico), (2001) and This Is Not a Landscape, (2004) are exemplary. The museum guard was eager to inform me that “Galisteo” depicts the creek where Stevens cast the ashes of her husband. The words/ripples are now tiny, the drips suggest rain, seepage from the creek and just paint drips. The canvas displays a negotiation of close hues and values that evoke the sublimity of sustained, enduring grief. Indeed, the horizontal blaze of the river that gleams out of the penumbral warmth reminds of the neon strips in some of Mary Weatherford’s paintings. This is a long way indeed from the overt satire of the “Big Daddy” canvas that begins Stevens’ show.

The post “All Art Comes From Something”: Mary Weatherford and May Stevens at Site Santa Fe appeared first on artcritical.

In Self-Portrait Picking Up the Pieces, his baggage is more cultural than natural. Visible through the interstices of a loosely meshed net are giant sculpted Buddha heads sporting hairstyles that could be mistaken for bunches of grapes, ripped untimely from the ceiling of a late renaissance palazzo. These are interspersed with oversized shell motifs and other quasi-architectural ornaments. Stranger still, many of the “objects”, upon close inspection, turn out to be vignettes from lost paintings that we almost recognize. Upon a distorted grid of metal pipes are mounted giant medallions displaying bizarre images of destruction that might have been purloined from the background of a Bosch painting. Some incongruously contain words, like “oops” or “hard place,” the latter humorously positioned next to a large rock

It would be arduous to itemize the dizzying range of appropriated objects and images that are packed into Heffernan’s paintings, which read as a Borgesian collection of which they form the animated inventory or catalogue, a kind of cultural and biological stocktaking. It is as if the artist is on a Messianic mission to collect examples of every period, culture and species prior to what one must only assume to be an impending apocalypse. This notion gains credence from “Self-Portrait as Burial Mound” where pairs of crazed animals are released from a pagoda-like structure. Noah is nowhere to be seen, but a sign says “OHNOAH” and others say “Almost done” and “Roar”.

But what to make of the abundant, almost ubiquitous, explosions of fertility that might suggest some hope that can be gleaned from the future, concretized in the Christmas ornament clutched by the “budding boy” Jack? His languid demeanor in many of these canvases evokes hints of the Pre-Raphaelites and their attempts to build a culture around medieval romance, so despite the cool and limpid light of spring, the frequent blossoming forth of flower, fruit and foliage, the youthful promise of the “budding boy”, for me, there is something disturbingly fin de siècle about these paintings. It is as if the plants and trees have been over-fertilized or genetically engineered, as if Julie Heffernan is inter-splicing the genes, not only of the flora and fauna that she depicts so lovingly but of the different cultural influences, whether they be derived from Jan Breughel, Remedios Varo, Sandro Botticelli, DG Rossetti or a wealth of other effortlessly evoked artists. Surely this might be the source for my unease in the presence of these superficially Arcadian scenes, which flatter to deceive. Nature and culture have been grafted together in ways that suggest the manhood of the main protagonist will be dogged by the hollow promises of a genetically engineered paradise. Societal consumption, the superabundance of artifacts and the ability through technology to remake the world according to man’s unfulfillable appetites are subtly satirized in Heffernan’s consumption and manipulation of other art and other artists’ styles. This might be seen, particularly with her recent incorporation of text labels, as a gentle but pointed critique of postmodernism.

The pervading mood is one of hope soured, but it is also more than this.  Heffernan has treated her canvases to a virtuosic painterly technique culled from the collected resources of European art, while focusing on the flamboyant trompe-d’oeil effects of Dutch and Spanish still lives. She has packed them with countless, carefully selected quotations and appropriations, from Adam Elsheimer to Arnold Böcklin to Max Ernst.  The entire edifice groans under the weight of these accumulated riches, however, which now read as so many obsolete jujus. It is as if she is pulling the rug out from underneath her own feet, and we find ourselves gasping, hoping upon hope that the human spirit can continue to shine through, despite the fact that all our aspirations seem to rest on Jack, the ‘budding boy’ who embodies the next generation. We have to hope that no more branches will be severed from his tree whose naked stumps are prettified by colors painted over their growth rings. We have to hope that we can build a culture from the over-taxed resources of the earth, from the late mannerist phase of postmodernism and the accumulated relics of the past. Whether this can be achieved through a savagely accelerated form of hybridization, à la Monsanto, seems in doubt. Thus the tragic but honest pessimism at the core of Heffernan’s endeavor.

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October 29, 2007–February 11, 2008

The late 20th century art world had a bad conscience about high art which was vilified as serious, profound, mysterious, spiritual, elitist, pretentious, outmoded and labor-intensive. This led to infatuation with popular culture (silly, superficial, obvious, materialistic, egalitarian, simple, immediate and honest) which still predominates in the new century, and no one better exemplifies this infatuation than Takashi Murakami. His work is the subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, soon to be seen In Brooklyn.

It is difficult to get past the hype that surrounds Murakami, much of it of his own making, and to separate it from the work itself. It may be that Murakami is trying to cancel such a separation and in so doing is questioning the relationship of art to hype and art to consumerism. The thrust of the erudite and entertaining essays in the lavish catalog that accompanies the show point us in that direction, but I feel that it is the least interesting aspect of Murakami’s work, despite what it might be convenient for him to believe in that it provides him with a dialectic that ultimately justifies his own single-minded money-making as part of a deeper strategy to expose ideological fissures in the art establishment. The Louis Vuitton collaboration in joint marketing is thus an integral part of the gallery space, not merely relegated to the gift store where it might more traditionally belong.

There are other, more interesting, less peripheral, issues with which Murakami’s work confronts the early 21st century viewer. The central issue is whether the traditional linguistic and iconographic resources of western art have exhausted themselves, as so many of its practitioners proclaim with something approaching clockwork regularity, and whether they can be revitalized by a shot in the arm from popular and non-western culture. Of course these situations have arisen before, most notably at the inception of Modernism with its appropriation of tribal, psychotic and children’s art.

What distinguishes Murakami from early modernists is that he originates from the other side of the divide, with his training in Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting) and his obsession with anime and manga. However he is much more of a hybrid than Picasso or Matisse because his own culture has been so deeply inflected by western influence already. Nihonga, in particular, was an attempt to meld Japanese aesthetics with western techniques and spatial structures.

Thus Murakami does not have to be self-conscious about his eclecticism and can quite happily superimpose characters cloned from Mickey Mouse, with the iconography of Buddhism, the stylistic devices of anime and the aesthetics of Muromachi screen painting. The burning question is what all of this adds up to apart from an exercise in fusion. Tan Tan Bo Puking-a,k.a. Gero Tan of 2002 would be my answer. The vast Mickey Mouse-like figure of Tan Tan Bo silhouetted against a flat cerulean sky stands to Murakami’s ego as Guston’s signature kidney-shaped heads do to his. Both artists share a similar fascination with flatness and scale and both extract their imagery from comic book sources. Guston uses Expressioinist bravura handling to immerse his images within a sea of art historical reference, guaranteeing a type of authenticity, whereas Murakami retains the flatness and blandness of his sources. Tan Tan Bo should not be seen in isolation as this character resurfaces in different guises in much of the artist’s work. His features surmount the vast factory built Oval Buddha of 2007, and they are dismembered and abstracted into the decorative dynamics of Edo screen-like canvases such as PO+KU Surrealism Mr DOB-Yellow, Pink, Blue, Purple, Green,1998.

In Tan Tan Bo Puking the narrative exposition explored in earlier canvases approaches something of a climax in the massive simultaneous eructation of multicolored streams of vomit from a face grimacing a mountainous range of black incisors. We might remember that women of the imperial Japanese court also dyed their teeth black. The sublimely childlike world of playful decorative swirls, joyful cumulus clouds, cobalt skies is cataclysmically aborted, giving way to disgust and despair, but not without a sense of tragic grandeur. For me it is almost as if the wonderfully puerile but illusory balloon of pre-adolescent reverie has been inflated to a bursting point, that will yield the dark night of the soul of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, directly referenced in other paintings of Murakami likeTime Bokan-black 2001. Innocence is under a threat that only the sustained opulence of the colors and the mechanically perfect outlines can pretend to withstand.  This is surely the most compelling meditation on adolescence since Munch’s Puberty. Here the crisis takes on cosmic proportions and new planetary systems seem to evolve from Tan Tan’s various appendages. The disaster is further compounded by the fact that this canvas is a visual inventory of Murakami’s signature icons, the Laura Ashley flowers, magic mushrooms, DOB heads, grotesque Pokemon eyes, Buddha smiles, decorative spirals, all of them breathing their last in an impending cosmic dissolution that might suggest a more compelling form of self-doubt than we normally associate with Murakami’s self-promotional verbal statements.

Murakami should be judged on works like Tan Tan Bo Puking, on whether it can sustain, the intensity and reach of the paintings with which it aligns itself, like the giant, cartoon-haunted, Crumbesque canvases of Philip Guston, the delicate surrealist cosmogonies of Joan Miro or the exploitation of emptiness in Japanese screen painting. It is Murakami’s surprisingly timeless achievement to have wrung from the unpromising and bland stylistic repertoire of anime and manga, executed by large teams of assistants, an original cosmogony sustained by an emotional intensity and conceptual sophistication that renders his flirtation with the world of consumerism at most a side-show and ultimately unnecessary. For me his artistic pedigree derives from Bosch, Guston, Miro and Jakuchi, not Warhol and Koons, as the essays in the catalog suggest.

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March 5 to 30, 2007

A number of works address the preparation and the journey itself. These include most notably Conversation, which consists of eight tower-like structures surmounted by clay or bronze animals, mostly crows and hares. On one level, that of their natural scale, these are animal sculptures on pedestals, but they rapidly shrug off this convention and behave like maquettes for an architectural monument or, on a more narrative and whimsical level, symbols of the victory of nature over culture. The high-rise buildings of New York City, which so impressed Senior when he flew over them on his way to California, are here reduced to pedestals. The animals become cross-Atlantic psychopomps feeling out the territory, at once lookouts, border guards, harbingers, and messengers.

The ambivalence of the journey is spotlighted in Hare Fleet. It is anything but fleet in terms of transatlantic passage or the normal locomotive abilities of this quicksilver mammal. This flotilla of hares seems tense, ill at ease, like freshly press-ganged crews of Viking longboats, victims of some bizarre practical joke, alert to the possibility that instead of plundering they may be sacrificed. The boats line the wall like an unlikely armada uncertain about where they are headed, uncertain whether they are painting or sculpture but elegant despite themselves. They suspect they will be deployed in new works of art in a place where they are described as ‘bunnies’. They hope that their cultural baggage will remain intact and that they will not be interbred with what passes for a hare on the other side of the water. They hope we will not notice that if they tip upside down they become a type of scrubbing brush.

The promise of cultural hybridization we see in Conversation is fulfilled in Hand Tools of Unknown Use. This is the most autobiographical work of Senior’s recent output. Estranged from his father, the fledgling artist found a surrogate in an uncle who initiated him into rural craftsmanship and the use of hand tools. So central is the sanctity of tools to Senior that most of the meanings in his work spin out these or the craft they endorse. Hand Tools of Unknown Use consists of a loose convocation of wooden handles, elegantly carved from branches broken from the eponymous sycamore tree of the street where Senior has relocated, to each of which is attached a single colored plastic business end salvaged mostly from discarded children’s toys.  These toy/tool hybrids are suspended, handles up, on a large wall. The theme and variations create enticing visual patterns, but beyond that we feel a gentle irony, almost a dig at some of the artist’s previous more orthodox exploitation of tools. The tools are clearly a metaphor for the artist himself and express his uncertainty, his sense of alienation and his powers of adaptation and renewal. He is now of ‘unknown use’ and must struggle to reinvent himself.  These tools precede their function and we struggle and delight in trying to elaborate uses for them as if invention were the mother of necessity. We are stimulated to devise activities or processes in some cases not yet known to humanity. How would it be if humans had started with tools and discovered functions to which they might fit rather than the reverse? How might human history have differed?  In this sense, and the plastic components provoke it, we are like children standing at the entrance to a world as yet unnamed but rich with imaginative possibilities.

Senior has thus transformed uncertainty into invention and has charted the process in his recent series of object groups.  In some he converts what is natural to his past into the form of his present and in others he transposes the objects of his present environment into a language of nostalgia for his former existence. Towers is a monument that embodies both of these practices. The eight structures of which it consists loosely conform to the skyscraper format, but through transpositions of materials and scale and utility they stand as testaments to a re-jigged nostalgia, a hybrid of memory and innovation in which the artist can cast the old forms into new molds. It is the signal achievement of Senior’s recent work to have invigorated the tendency to nostalgia in his earlier work, by exploiting the necessity of his current cultural alienation, and thus creating a potent meditation on the nature of memory as well as a subtle critique of multiculturalism.

The post Gordon Senior: Standing on Earth appeared first on artcritical.

November 1 to December 14, 2006

Minimalism strikes me as being quaintly obsolete, deriving from a formalist aesthetic that indulges in endgame polemics, arrogantly defining itself as the logical terminus of all previous painting and as the ultimate position that painting can take. As an artist with reductionist inclinations how do you engage in this severe legacy other than by proving yourself as a yet further reduction of your predecessors?

Eleanor Wood whose work is on display at Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco has skirted the periphery of Minimalism for her entire career, fine-tuning her obsessive, hypersensitive and exquisite miniature technique. In 2002 she moved from her native England to California, the displacement serving as catalyst for a body of work that demonstrates a departure from her previous practice, and rift with Minimalist orthodoxy.

Joinery, grid-work, weaving, sewing, scarification, and wound dressing are among the material associations the work evokes, a virtual compendium of fabrication techniques. The insistent reminder of age and wear, as if the images had somehow been allowed to mature and steep over lengthy periods, as if what we see were merely a vestige of the result of corrosion or patination (see no: 6), evokes a poignant sense of reflection, memory, and loss.

The fragility and apparent age of these images tempers their insistent sense of order, order that we sense rests on implicit but radical contradictions.  Take the  downplaying of the relationship of  image to the paper’s edges, or the deliberate uncertainty about what constitutes the image. This involves an unexpected union of the negation of geometric hierarchy common to Abstract Expressionism, with the precision, and compactness of Minimalism.  One might expect the pervasive grid format employed by Wood, albeit subtly subverted on occasion, to brace itself against the edges of the support, to assert its completeness and finality. However her work defies this expectation, placing the colored rectangles in singles or couples far enough from the paper’s edge as to suggest that any proportion, other than the insistent but nuanced proportion contained in the grid, is secondary. Each work embraces a sense of infinitely plotted spatial extension, while at the same time instantiating a finite, precise, insistent, rigidly contained, eye-catching, hypnotic singularity. Arguably the most significant proportion is the relative thickness of the image, built out of multiple layers, to the scale of its dimensions. If these measured 8.5 x 8.5 feet instead of inches the colored rectangle would be at least two inches thick to retain this proportion!

The intensely saturated rectangles that at once appear to hover above the surface, (notice the soft, shadows surrounding the rectangles in no: 13), while simultaneously appearing to be woven into it, (notice the grid-work of strips of wax punctuated with pinholes in 20) ultimately seem like manifestations of an infinite, slumbering latency. It is as if Wood is evoking a limitless spatial continuity, a type of invisible mathematical progression that becomes periodically visible through a temporary window-like opening.

The assertive color saturations are new to Wood’s previously monochrome repertoire. They are achieved through painting washes of watercolor onto the reverse side of absorbent paper. Waxed Japanese paper is then glued over the front surface as a barrier on top of which intricate layers of oil pastel are applied. The effect is one of finely calibrated pulsations of light and matter that mirror, on a microcosmic level, the tension between enbedment in and flotation above the paper support of the central colored rectangles.

Ultimately it is not the sense of contradiction that animates the work so much as an alternating visual current. This constantly switches between the centrifugal sense of expansiveness and indefiniteness inherent in the colored rectangles and their insistent symmetry and eye-catching centripetal focus. The work suggests that the universe, both internal and external, emerges and dissolves with respiratory regularity, and in this sense it is actually breathtaking.

The post Eleanor Wood: Mixed media on paper appeared first on artcritical.

September 7 to October 5, 2006

Cotton batting, plywood, ping pong balls, washers, stand-mounted lights, disused filing cabinets, plaster, wax, computers and CD players were among the unlikely list of items in Robin Hill’s recent exhibition at CSU Stanislaus. Her art – at once graphic, sculptural, installation-like, objettrouve-like, photographic, sonic and not a little conceptual –transcends traditional genre boundaries.

Many of her mini-quasi-installations are directly interactive, the contact being initiated by the viewer mustering the courage to touch, encouraged by the suppression of the visual in preference for the tactile as a major rhetorical strategy. Viewers might be startled by the immediate translation of touch into sound, at its most surprising in “Kardex”, made of an early 20th Century filing cabinet with 29 slim drawers, the opening of some of which triggers a sonic backdrop by composer Sam Nichols in addition to revealing photographic images of the human ear, the latter surely a pun on the sounds experienced in this way.

Further references to “obsolete” nineteenth-century technology create a magical marriage of effort and effortlessness in “Beach Debris” where nine 108-inch long vertical cyanotypes lean against the wall at equal distances apart. The vertical panels with pairs of hands at their upper edges suggest gravity, and chunks of debris seem to cascade from the hands. This ironically disguises the process of their manufacture, in which the objects to be reproduced must sit for prolonged periods on the horizontal surface of the cyanotype paper. “Beach Debris” might be a slow motion take of the process of making Duchamp’s “Three Standard Stoppages”- a process of a process- and gains added resonance through the prevailing notion that Duchamp’s stoppages could not have been made in the way he stated, by dropping meter-long pieces of string onto canvas from a height of one meter. The visual lie in Hill’s work is clearly of a more honest variety than Duchamp’s and integral rather than supplementary to its visual dynamics.

The fact that meanings are so trenchantly embedded in the very fabric and manufacture of these works provides the locus for interpreting them. Relationships among materials, processes and meanings are so oblique, or idiosyncratic, however, that meanings have to be unraveled, unpacked or uncovered from their material envelopes. The viewer must actively engage with works even where they do not strictly require physical interaction to be fully perceived. In this fashion the formally interactive works like “Kardex” and “Say it Back” provide the clue to the more subdued interactiveness of all the other work.

Part of the unpacking solicits a type of puzzle–solving mentality, and the ability to link sensory and cognitive experience in unexpected, unpracticed routines. This yields a startling synthesis of perspectivism, (the notion that all viewpoints are somehow equally valid), with an insistence on the essential modularity of existence, for which the best metaphors, those conjured directly by the work, are blueprints or genetic codes. The seemingly casual methodology; a type of homage to serendipity in which many of the materials or components are found and recycled by the artist, is counterbalanced by a formalism based on themes and variations suggesting that chance is, in fact, a complex form of order.

Duchamp’s work and its disciples in Conceptual art have tended to demote the visual in a puritanical act of sensory denial. Hill’s work manages to subdue the visual sufficiently for it to act as a metaphor for the other senses in addition to suggesting a code or formula that underlies appearance. The code can only be deciphered through a synthesis of all of the senses in which they are ultimately understood as traces of or pointers towards the actual. Thus Hill’s work is deeply conceptual without succumbing to the intellectual posturing of some Conceptual art.

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