Blurred Elegies of Futures Past
I began using different types of materials because I was looking for a new way to paint. Working with materials that already exist afford me associations that are beyond my invention. I see opportunities everywhere as paintings: in images that already exist, a surface that will respond to paint in a certain way, or it might simply come from an accident within the process of painting.
My studio work incorporates found materials and appropriated images in the creative process. This allows the images to become meaningful because of their symbolic association. Even though I seek to make my artwork approachable to the viewer it isn’t something that dictates my decisions in the process of making art. I don’t work with a preconceived idea or notion of content at the onset. As meaning is assigned to the images and interrelationships develop, the content and direction eventually emerge as a byproduct of process. I’m interested in visual tension; whether this tension is created through chance, the use of humor, odd relationships, or the re-examining, re-hashing, and re-interpretation of close encounters with life.
In combining my Surrealists interest in the unconscious with a postmodern sensibility, I create evocative paintings and collages that are distinctively psychically charged. These multifaceted works are composed from cut or torn fragments from children’s coloring books or comic illustrations, and paper remnants. They often incorporate Disney characters and other recognizable cartoon icons. Images that are normally considered innocent and harmless are placed in illogical juxtapositions, resulting in a hybrid image composed of multiple parts.
About the Artist
Craig Hill is a visual artist working in painting, collage, and mixed media sculpture. His work juxtaposes varied modes of representation, creating a visual mash-up that highlights how certain iconography expresses American belief structures. His work is filled with visual contradictions and playful circumstances that are arranged in a single anxious moment.
Hill earned his BFA in Drawing from the Atlanta College of Art in 1998 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. Currently he teaches painting and drawing as an associate professor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Hill has exhibited extensively, in group and solo shows in Washington D.C., New Orleans, Minneapolis, Boston, Atlanta, Providence, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Columbus, Ohio.
Reception: Friday, November 12th 6-8pm