GARY HILL’S GLASS ONION

August 3 – September 15, 2007 at 911 Media Arts Center

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.

A Diagram of Glass Onion, demonstrating the merging of artist and viewer. The installation consists of4 rectangles: 4 monitors on the outside, then 4 speakers, 4 more speakers, and a single monitor in the center. As you read this talking about the piece, notice that you are inside the rectangle of the printed text.

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Gary Hill

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Curated by Misha Neininger, 911’s Executive Director, this exhibition will spotlight Hill’s Glass Onion, 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 becomes topologically mapped into a field of concentric rectangles reflecting further the inherent structures of video feedback and cybernetics. 911 Media Arts Center is pleased to present a reprise of this seminal work, continuing 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 are Clover, 1994, and Twofold (Goats and Sheep), 1995 / 2002. These works hint 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 are described by Hill as “resonating membranes” through which the artist and viewer begin to merge.

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