Robin Hill. There Was

About

She has always identified as a sculptor, traditionally an artist who makes objects, but over time has embraced an approach that asserts equivalence between what she makes and what already exists.

The works in her 2010 exhibition here, Case Discussions, combines structures and mechanisms used in research, labs and academia. For example, Hill placed a tiny mica washer into a microfiche reader, a now obsolete device. The enlarged and projected image of the washer resembles an eye, seemingly gazing at the viewer. She did nothing but place two elements in relation to each other, and found a new way to express an appreciation of what it means to look at something.

In the current exhibition, There Was, there are a number of new things Hill wants viewers to see. One is a charred wooden chair. Another is an abandoned house in the process of collapsing in on itself, recorded in a monumental cyanotype. Thought Bubbles, presented as archival digital prints, are serendipitous accumulations or juxtapositions of materials that interested her. Short phrases clipped from The New York Times became found poetry: “inferred from subtle changes,” “unravel the circumstances,” “while in motion,” “caught between two worlds,” “under the rosiest assumptions,” and “I see it every day,” are among the phrases that populate Weighing Paper.

Among the categories of things Hill collects are sea bricks and concretions. Sea bricks are exactly what they sound like – ruddy, fired-clay building blocks worn, eroded and rounded by water, sand and time. They lose their manufactured rectilinearity under the forces of nature, eventually taking on the form of rocks and pebbles. Concretions are geological oddities, round and hard, millions of years old, created in a complex process of organic dec ay and mineralization in the sedimentary layers of ancient oceans. Now and again, they drop from the oceanfront cliffs, and Robin Hill has been assiduously harvesting these stones from her beach for decades.

In determining the form of these two new installations, Cairn and Concretions, Hill turned to friend and designer Ulla Warchol, who sourced used lumber and constructed supports for the collections of sea bricks and concretions. They have been placed on raw planks atop sawhorses; these supports are not mere pedestals but integral parts of the realized sculptures. Hill offers these found, studied, and chosen objects to us, as on an altar, as touchstones for an awareness of time, process, material, art making and the pure experience of experience itself.