Gary Hill
born in 1951 Santa Monica, CA (USA); 1973 first video experiments; in the 1980s starts a video program at the Cornish College of the Arts; since 1985 lives in Seattle (USA).
Gary Hill is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words, sounds and electronic images. The video image with its essential component sound is explored using different approaches of discourse analysis and models of language as a semantic and semiotic system. The exact conceptual frame of his works leads to precise formal image and sound structures as well as to a complex circuit of mutual re-definitions: immaterial, futile systems of displacement, fusion, detachments of constituents of meaning. His inquiries into linguistics and consciousness offer resonant philosophical and poetic insights, as he explores the formal conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements with the body and the self.
He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s. His reading of the writings of Maurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of ‘the other’ stemming from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Such reading informs Hill’s visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. In 1976 Hill met poet George Quasha who, along with Charles Stein, inspired Hill’s first experiments with language.
Hill’s body of work evolved into an ongoing deconstruction/reconstruction of ideas and images central to Western culture. These include apart of the notions of language and textuality also the concept of the body as an intermediary between nature and culture/technology. Processes of activation by which viewers become self-conscious participants in a work are an integral part of Hill’s approach.
Hill’s work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer. He uses modern technology to create sculptures and environments that take the viewer on a ride through their mind, and he uses his body to create multilayered video installations in which language, speech, text, and image overlap and intersect.
His works have many layers, using all the trappings of modern technology, including software, hardware and mechanical devices. A typical exhibition often includes multiple monitors and rear projection technology with screens as large as 25 feet, sound and an interactive environment that is designed to bring the viewer into the experience.
