WOLFSBURG.- Images and language are deconstructed and regenerated, gestures are transformed into speech, colors are exchanged and manipulated, texts are spoken forwards and backwards. From a loudspeaker membrane slowly filled with sand, we hear that a voice is buried here… The exhibition Gary Hill. A Question of Perception shows how the American US-American media conceptual artist has been revealing the essence of image and language through the medium of video for more than five decades.
Active since the 1970s, Gary Hill (b. 1951 in Santa Monica, lives in Seattle) is one of the key practitioners working with video , language and electronic media. With his inimitable feel for a medium’s technical and conceptual possibilities, he helped establish the liminality between video, performance and conceptual practices in contemporary art. Long before the manipulation of media became commonplace, Gary Hill’s videos repeatedly brought together the elements of image, language, and text, creating a special awareness of how we perceive and process different kinds of information. His work is particularly relevant today because of the ubiquity of electronically generated images and their manipulability.
Gary Hill’s videos and installations do not tell stories; on the contrary, he uses technical means to orchestrate, modulate, and stage experiences or phenomenological phenomena. On the one hand, they create an expanded consciousness; on the other, they sow a deep skepticism about the construction of perception, meaning, or reality. Far beyond a mere critique of images and media, his works invite us to question our habitual patterns of perception and judgment. Through a strategy of discontinuity, he develops new visual and auditory modes of perception and communication. His art draws on everyday, personal, literary, scientific, and philosophical experiences and themes. For Gary Hill, the medium is never merely a means of representation, but always an invitation to reflection. He demonstrates that “images are not just there but emerge with the light of each moment” (Gottfried Boehm).
All of Gary Hill’s video works are of powerful intensity and at the same time create great intimacy. In terms of content and their media dynamics, they never work towards a quick punch line or a specific climax. It is a special quality of his work that Gary Hill always maintains a productive balance between content and effect. This balance is particularly conducive to a conscious and intense experience of temporality. In some cases, the images literally burn themselves onto our retinas or develop such a strong physical presence that individual images and words reverberate in our memory for a long time.
With forty-six works spanning five decades, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg has the largest collection of works by the American video pioneer in Germany. In the last few years, several more recent installations have been added to the holdings and are now being shown for the first time in this exhibition.
