In this body of work, first presented in a solo exhibition at Lennon Weinberg, Inc. New York in 2017, I am presenting collections of forms and situations that I think of as self-made artworks. The serendipitous intersection of my encounters with these forms and situations, and their readiness to be seen/delivered/released, is the moment of making. Time is the thread that moves through all of the work in this exhibition: geological, economic, industrial, imaginary, political, personal.
There was . . . an eroding cliff revealing 400-million-year-old concretions over the years, a coastline giving forth bricks worn by the sand, a collapsed house returning to the forest floor, a decommissioned glass beaker, studio detritus, a daily supply of the New York Times, a burned chair, dried fruit, discarded cotton from an obsolete factory in Brooklyn, a grapevine with tendrils, a strand of mica washers, a pile of dryer lint, a linen fire hose, an empty specimen box. These are some of the forms and situations deployed in this meditation on beauty and possibility.
Extraction is my primary process, followed by acts of carving, polishing, ordering, heaving, hauling, balancing, stacking, assembling, softening, stiffening, stringing, layering, superimposing, combining, cutting, placing, storing, relocating, documenting, pondering, coveting, claiming, collecting, displaying, suggesting, proposing, and wondering.
Cairn, 2017. 60 x 60 x 48 inches, bricks washed ashore in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, wood.
Photo by Jill Weinberg Adams.
Concretions, 2017. 27 x 240 x 10 inches, limestone concretions found in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, wood.
Photo by Jill Weinberg Adams.
Burned Chair, 2017. 33 x 17 x 18 inches, wood.
Photo by Jill Weinberg Adams.
Collapsing House, 2017. 92 x 140 inches, cyanotype on aqaba paper.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Weighing Papers, 2017. 85-inch diameter, calendered paper pulp sheets, collaged New York Times newsprint 2016–2017, pin clips, gessoed canvas.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Weighing Papers, detail, 2017. 85-inch diameter, calendered paper pulp sheets, collaged New York Times newsprint 2016–17, pin clips, gessoed canvas.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Weighing Papers, detail, 2017. 85-inch diameter, calendered paper pulp sheets, collaged New York Times newsprint 2016–2017, pin clips, gessoed canvas.
Photo by Jill Weinberg Adams.
Thought Bubble 13, 2017. 24 x 36 inches, dried scallion husks, cage tag, mirror, glass beaker, archival digital print.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Thought Bubble 1, 2017. 24 x 36 inches, dryer lint, archival digital print.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Thought Bubble 5, 2017. 24 x 36 inches, file rack, cage tags, waxed paper, archival digital print.
Photo by Robin Hill.
Robin Hill is an artist whose work focuses on the intersection between drawing, photography, and sculpture. Her recent work takes on a collaborative sensibility, where objects and materials which have been rejected by others serve as starting points for acts of transformation. The underlying conceptual thread that moves throughout her work is her interest in collection, extraction, and re-presentation, and in transforming seemingly inconsequential matter into meaningful statements about matter itself, which ultimately becomes a meditation on time. She strives to give shape to nuance and to relocate familiar things in an unfamiliar order. While handmade might best describe her early work, hand-altered is a more apt description for the work she is doing today. Robin is on the faculty of the Studio Art Program, Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her work can be seen at
http://www.robin-hill.net/.
