Glass Onion
Gary Hill
August 3 - September 25, 2007

Recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, Gary Hill has been working with sculpture and electronic media since the early 1970’s.  He has produced a large body of both single-channel video works and mixed-media installations. His long time work with intramedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.

This exhibit featured Hill’s Glass Onion, 1981/2007, a complex installation work incorporating a close-circuit video camera, five video displays, and eight speakers. Precisely scored animated text and layered speech both describe and mirror the process of feedback. The viewer became topologically mapped into a field of concentric rectangles reflecting further the inherent structures of video feedback and cybernetics. 911 Media Arts Center was pleased to present a reprise of this seminal work, which continued an already longstanding collaboration of mutual support with the artist that began in 1981, when Hill premiered Glass Onion at 911 Media Arts Center’s predecessor, and/or.

Also included in the exhibition were Clover, 1994, and Twofold (Goats and Sheep), 1995 / 2002. These works hinted at the thresholds between language and image, silence and sound, real time and recorded time, viewed and viewing, but rather than emerge as sets of dualities, these thresholds were described by Hill as “resonating membranes” through which the artist and viewer begin to merge. A Fragment from Twofold (Goats and Sheep) can be found here.

A special screening of the documentary Gary Hill: I Believe It Is an Image was also held as part of this exhibition in the 911 Media Arts Theater.  In this 54 minute documentary by Maria Anna Tappeiner and Reinhard Wulf, Gary Hill used 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.

This exhibit was curated by Misha Neininger.