Robin Hill
Making Mountains Out of Molehills
October 1997
exhibition location:
Lennon-Weinberg, Inc.
568 Broadway
New York, NY 10012
This body of work stands
in direct contrast to an aspect of waste removal which I observed on a daily
basis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for 20 years. Typically, refuse is brought to
a transfer station where it is churned into smaller pieces that will fill
huge containers more efficiently. Reduction is achieved through removal of
air space. In this work expansion is achieved through the addition of air
space. Physically, I am adding air to things, fluffing little things up into
bigger things, wasting not/wanting not. The expression, Making Mountains Out
of Molehills, is often used to express the notion that something is more basic
than it claims to be. I am suggesting that, as a working attitude, the expression
describes a kind of resourcefulness; a willingness to see a molehill as a
mountain, a willingness to shift ones perception to embrace small as big,
simple as complex, ordinary as elegant, low-end as high-end, easy as difficult,
accidental as purposeful, incidental as noteworthy.
Robin Hill
October 1997
"Like the process
art that followed Minimalism, these works imply the personal because they
are so explicit and literal in revealing the thinking and actions of the artist.
Hill's materials, however, are less forceful and dramatic than the wood, lead,
or rope used by her forebears. She serves up light-weight, disposable materials
consistent with theconsumer electronics and computer era. She is attracted
to the abstract adventitious beauty of circuitry and systems, but she opts
for the slower pace and intimacy of hand-making."
Janet Koplos
Robin Hill at Lennon-Weinberg, Inc.
Art In America
June 1998
"The artist's ideas
are about perception, as magic is. They are about limits and categories: Ephemeral
as opposed to substantive, profusion as opposed to waste. They are about the
recording and re-ordering of substances. Tied in with this are ideas of circularity,
the mutability of materials and the illusion of appearances (as in magic).
As a magician, Hill pre-determines the presence of air. light, weight, density
and accumulation to re-instigate and re-vitalize the space around each of
her objects. Her work is about many things, but it touches on the recording
of ephemera, the beauty of appearances and of cross-referenced accumulated
detail. Her homespun materials and repeated mark making create visual hymns
to the powers of repeated movements and gestures. The rhythms of Hill's recirculated
materials appearing in different contexts display a capacity for art making
which is intellectually curious and elegantly resolved without undo mannerism.
Hill's works seem to be the vibrant residues, and the end result of a dialogue
with haptic ( that is,tactile )space."
excerpt from "Seeing
is Believing"
by Dominique Nahas
publication: Review
October 15, 1997
