Gary Hill

Surfer, started making video installations around 1974. Concerns: images and meaning
Often references text, and lanuage in his imagery. He draws a connection between the body, language and space.


Recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, Hill has been working with video and sound since 1973. His intermedia use of text, speech and image explore the physicality of language and our thought processes. Hill creates complex installations which often solicit the viewer ís active involvement to the point of "completing" the works themselves.

Gary Hill has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the prestigious Leone díOro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 1998. His work has been included in six Whitney Biennial exhibitions since 1983 and in Documenta IX where one of his most ambitious works, Tall Ships, was premiered. His video, sound and performance work has been presented at museums and institutions throughout the world and will be the focus of an important survey in 2001 which is being organized by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and will travel to the Reina Sofia in Madrid and other venues in Europe and America.


The work, entitled Remembering Paralinguay, carries further the themes of viewing experienced in Tall Ships, Facing Faces and HanD HearD. A single protagonist (the artist Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson) emerges from a single point and over an extended period of time fills the room with her face, at the same time emitting "calls" before returning to the original position.


 

Gary Hill
Remembering Paralinguay, 2000 (with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson), Single-channel video/sound installation, 2000
courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, NYCWoman clad in black, approaches us and begins to wail unintelligibly (paralanguage). Beautiful yet awkward we identify with her anguish. Illustration of the failure of language to communicate pain and loss. (download film)

 

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