Robin Hill “There Was”

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

poster for Robin Hill “There Was”
[Image: Robin Hill "Cairn" (2017) bricks washed ashore in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, wood]

This event has ended.

In no particular order: making, finding, choosing, examining, and organizing are the fundamental activities that orient the work of Robin Hill. 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 Papers.

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 decay 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.
Robin Hill was born in Houston, Texas, and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives and works in Woodland, California and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and is on the faculty of the University of California Davis.

This is her sixth solo exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg since 1995. Her work has been shown in New York at Socrates Sculpture Park, Flipside, Smack Mellon Studios, Pierogi, Rotunda Gallery, Sculpture Center, PS 1/MOMA, and Lesley Heller Workspace; in the Bay Area at Don Soker Gallery, Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Crocker Museum, Jay Jay Gallery, San Francisco Center for the Book, and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; in LA, at Another Year in LA; in Houston at Project Row Houses and Fotofest.

Her work is in public collections including Yale University Art Museum, Achenbach Collection, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, Harvard University Art Museum, Manetti-Shrem Museum, Long Island University, UCLA Hammer Museum, and Crocker Art Museum.
Hill has received grants and awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts. She was Artist-in-Residence at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, India. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, Arts, Sculpture Magazine, Zettel, Art and Antiquities, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, New Yorker, Other Voices, National Public Radio, Yale University Radio, and KDVS-Davis and has been the subject of catalog essays for the exhibitions Case Discussions by Kristin Koster, Multiplying the Variations by Raphael Rubinstein, Emergence and Structure by Jonah Lehrer.

Media

Schedule

from March 09, 2017 to April 22, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-03-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Robin Hill

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