INSTALLATION ART; VIDEO ART
Hill, Gary
U.S. (1951 - )
Placing Sense Sens Placé
1995
Four-channel video on monitors mounted on metal dollies (color, with sound)
Variable
Gift of the artist
FA 2012.136
Keywords: Northwest artist: Washington, Seattle

Visitors may move the four monitors throughout the gallery.

Gary Hill has been a pioneer in the use of new technologies as artistic media since the 1970s. This installation is a meditation on the relationship between the camera, the body, and processes of perception. The four monitors display synchronized footage Hill created by carrying a camera through a house and intermittently setting it down. The effect displaces vision from the human eye, so that, in the words of the artist, the camera functions as its own “object of seeing,” a surrogate body and organ of perception. Through this vantage point, space is fractured and fragmented and resists cohesion.

Hill accentuates this exploration of spatial experience and cognitive processing by treating the monitors as three-dimensional objects, rather than merely flat screens to be looked at. As these monitors take up new positions and arrangements throughout the gallery, they continually reorganize the physical space and how the body navigates it, highlighting the embodied condition of perception.

Audio description: Camera clatters when it is picked up and set down. Mechanical whirring when camera is stationary.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to April 22, 2018.
Copyright credit: Copyright Gary Hill (1995)