Gary Hill

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Gary Hill (born in 1951, Santa Monica, California, U.S.) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide (Artfacts 2007). He is represented by Donald Young Gallery of Chicago.

An anthology on the work of Gary Hill by Robert C. Morgan was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999.

Gary Hill's work is especially significant due to his incorporation of text into video art, evident in works such as Incidence of Catastrophe 1977-78. Hill began working with video, text and sound in 1973. He was influenced by the intellectual orientation of conceptual art which dominated art of the 1970s. His reading of the writings of Maurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other' stemming from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Such reading informs Hill's visual-poetic explorations of the interrelationships between language, image, identity, and the body. For example in Cabin Fever he uses the binary opposition of light and darkness to convey the notion of an interaction between a self and an ‘other’.^[1] Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer. In Roland Barthes' terms, Hill’s video narratives can be understood as ‘writerly’ texts.