Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s, producing a large body of single-channel videos, mixed-media installations, and performance work. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.
The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment is a declaration claiming the psychoactive event of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a "found performance" and as "the art experience par excellence." The claim is expanded upon, suggesting that over time it will be he ...
Watch NowFiguring Grounds – like Tale Enclosure, 1985 – was edited from three hours of recordings made at the Stained Glass Studio in Barrytown, New York, where Hill's Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia), 1984, was also taped. Facing one another, Q ...
Watch NowObservaciones Sobre los Colores consists of a single video projection in which a boy reads a Spanish translation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color, Part 1 (1951), consisting of 88 segments, in real time over a period of 78 minutes. Hill provided a modifie ...
Watch NowBlind Spot constructs a space of living portraiture by "focusing time" on an exchange between the artist (the camera) and a man on the street in the small Algerian neighborhood of Belsunce in Marseille, France. As the camera zooms in slowly on its subject, ...
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Goats and Sheep uses the source material of the installation Withershins, 1995, consisting of two simultaneous views of a person signing: the hands and arms are framed in one, and the back of the head and top of the shoulders in the other. This latter view ...
Watch NowDVD insert of monograph Gary Hill: Around & About: A Performative View containing a compilation of Hill's performance art. ...
Watch NowSolstice d'Hiver was Hill's last single-channel video before the recently completed Goats and Sheep and Blind Spot. The work was recorded in real time and was taped December 21, between the hours of 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. At the beginning the camera moves ...
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With startling precision, Site/Recite moves across and around a table-top graveyard — bones, butterfly wings, egg shells, seed pods, crumpled notes, skulls — in a series of seamless edits that present a continuous flow of detailed close-ups. This taxon ...
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In the video, Thomas the protagonist is played by Hill which confounds the self-reflexive nature of the book's relationships all the more, making the video something of a "transcreation." The "reader" begins in the liquidity of the text almost as if he we ...
Watch NowDisturbance (among the jars) is a multi-lingual adaptation of selected Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945/46. The structure of the piece is based around the metaphor of fragmentation, more specifically, that of a broken sentence ...
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"The beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills t ...
Watch NowRecorded on location in Japan, this work was inspired by the notion of "acoustic palindromes," aural versions of written palindromes, located in the Japanese language. Hill creates this palindromic world as a site for excavation, uncovering new meanings an ...
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Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to fac ...
Watch NowThis tape is the first of Hill's works for which he deliberately wrote a screenplay. The title defines the piece's starting point: Alice in Wonderland asks her omniscient father why things get in a muddle. They then talk on a metalinguistic level. A glimps ...
Watch NowThis work is the single-channel version of a multi-channel installation of the same name. The picture plane is divided into a left and a right half. A changing background is formed by colorful, highly graphic patterns reminiscent of TV test signals and v ...
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1980-81, 13:27 min, b&w, sound Videograms is an ongoing series of text/image constructs or syntaxes using the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device that enables Hill to sculpt electronic forms on the screen. Each "videogram" relates literally or conceptually ...
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"In 1979-80, I was teaching in the Media Studies Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, filling in for Woody and Steina Vasulka, who had left for Santa Fe. Midway in the year I abruptly had to leave my apartment and move into my officeâ ...
Watch NowThis piece was originally planned by the artist as a reading for the Viewpoint series at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "It was an attempt to circumscribe my work in the structure of a reading," Hill explains. Processual Video is minimal with regards to ...
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"Made just before Around & About, this work is something of a 'manifesto in jest' against television…. I'm a sit-in viewer looking slightly up at the screen making simple gestures into the camera. The mood is ambiguous as I seem to be watching a mirror, ...
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Using the phenomenon of inverted (or negative) video feedback, this work constructs a one-to-one correspondence between recited text and image. Black and white rectangles, embedded one within another against a black background, are generated through a clos ...
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Two color video cameras, two microphones, Dave Jones prototype modules (input amplifiers, variable soft/hard keyers, output amplifier, analog-to-digital converter, bit switch, digital-to-analog converter), assorted speaker cones, enclosed speaker, sand, la ...
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In this work, the field of Hill's experimentation is the synchronization of visual and linguistic elements. For Equal Time, he sets up a minimalist arrangement, whereby two identical panels with grid patterns, starting respectively on the left and right si ...
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"A structural work (with humor) that uses indeterminacy to forge an abstract landscape upon which the 'vision' of an ox appears. A sequence of words—hierarchically ordered from the utilitarian (functions and processes of the tools being used to make the ...
Watch NowA single solid white line rotates 180 degrees, beginning at a vertical position in the middle of the screen. At first, it forms "stair-steps," and then, approaching horizontality, it intermittently breaks up, literally between the (scan) lines. Continuing, ...
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Objects from the artist's studio (hammer, cathode ray tube, circuit board rack, chair, clip light) constitute the subjects for a series of short sequences in which a single object moves through a series of overlapping transformations. These are electronica ...
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Silent or with minimal sound, Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density through the camera obscura and image processing devices. Of these tapes, Hill has written that "much of the subject matter and the exp ...
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The artist's mouth fills the whole image plane. Silently the words "red," "blue," "green" are slowly and repeatedly articulated. The color of the screen switches from red to blue to green at a quickened rate. Utilizing the same rate, the spoken words, "red ...
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Dave Jones prototype modules (keyers, color field generators, output amplifier), black-and-white camera, microphone and Serge audio modules (voltage controlled oscillators, filters, sequencer) ...
Watch NowThe basis of this "sound/image construct," recorded in real time, are three black-and-white still images: a keyboard, a flute, and an African drum. These motifs are altered through digitalization, solarization, and interframe switching. As they alternate, ...
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One of the earlier works Hill produced on the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer, Elements combines abstract "landscapes" with fragmented syllabic language. Undulating topological forms superimpose themselves on one another, changing their shape and direction of ...
Watch Now"The image plane is divided into three sections. In the lower half, a close-up of two hands form a circle out of a metal rod. The upper half of the screen is vertically divided into two parts. On the right, a concurrent view of bending the rod with the ent ...
Watch NowThe work's images appear as visualizations of electronically generated sounds. Initially, small pulsating pixel structures occasionally appear on the black screen. These monadic forms become larger, ultimately filling the picture plane and pulsating ever m ...
Watch NowIn Bathing, as in his Mirror Road, Windows and Objects with Destinations, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density. ...
Watch NowOur visual field is dominated by gossamer layers that become distorted in fluid motion, break off, begin anew and continually change color. As we continue looking, they break down into seemingly amorphous constructions. We see details, textures and pattern ...
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Our visual field is dominated by gossamer layers that become distorted in fluid motion, break off, begin anew and continually change color. As we continue looking, they break down into seemingly amorphous constructions. We see details, textures and pattern ...
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In Mirror Road, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density. Amorphous structures move across the monitor like drifting clouds, changing color and direction. From time to time structu ...
Watch NowA fixed color camera is slightly defocused on the wire mesh of a window screen. Outside the window the leaves of trees are moving with the wind. The images, about one-half second each, are edited directly to the master tape at intervals based on the set-up ...
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A humanoid form strikes its body while making primal guttural sounds. At times the form is "stopped" and "started" using the pause of a reel-to-reel video player—a frozen line of noise (an asynchronous frame) cuts through the image reinforcing the sense ...
Watch Now"I was thinking of the camera as a kind of archeological tool that I could use to dig into or slice through the landscape —one among many studies toward using the camera in a highly physical way. ...
Watch NowThe strategy for recording and composing Air Raid was derived from sound rather than image. This produced some unusual juxtapositions between images found in the everyday: a lawnmower, the wrapping of fruit with tin foil, a cement mixer, record player, tel ...
Watch NowRecorded in Woodstock, New York, Rock City Road incorporates multiple levels of rescanned images of walking on different surfaces, including pavement and snow-covered terrain. The images have been rescanned and manipulated using reel-to-reel videotape reco ...
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In this program video artist Gary Hill uses a number of his pieces to investigate otherness and ambiguity, dislocation of the senses, the boundary between words and comprehension, the physicality of text, and figurative interactivity. ...
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The film tells a story with no dialogue. The group of boy skaters are suddenly at a point when one of the boys sees a young girl, and becomes interested in her. This causes a rift with the other boys, who challenges him to a skating duel that goes down a h ...
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