Our inaugural Virtual Exhibition, Hold the Capstone, includes three new paintings by Justine Hill and will run concurrently with our exhibition of her work at EXPO Chicago.
The three paintings included in Hold the Capstone pick up where Hill left off with her sixteen paintings titled, Bookends from 2017-2019. The Bookends were about highlighting the landscape-style compositions in her work. They all included a subject, a ground or place and a background or space. They were also self-contained and did not move around the wall as her earlier Cut-Outs had behaved.
Hold the capstone 1, 2, & 3 evolved directly from these ideas of landscape but are more specific in their subject and their structure. They each contain a circular focal point as their subject in the top half of the composition and they also each grew what Hill refers to as feet allowing them to behave as both landscape and figure. These pieces continue Hill’s interest in exaggerated mark-making and also involve a newer style of collaged canvas and paper in their construction.
Works from the virtual exhibition will be available online exclusively through October 8, 2019.
Not to be overlooked is Hill’s ‘mark,’ a signature of her work. Hill has mastered a process involving the entire composition. Freehand sketches are turned into digital representations in Photoshop where they can be manipulated without mixing paint. She returns to her computer in a back and forth analysis of shape and mark. Her process almost entirely eliminates any automatism. Impulse and spontaneity are replaced by a deliberate deliberation of design.
Hill’s combination of mark and shape or mark on shape goes beyond the spatial and the decorative. Her paintings offer contrasting moods: pain and ugliness of the real with beauty and happiness of the ideal. Overall, her paintings suggest that paint on a flat surface is more specific than actual space because it can mean anything from inert materiality to intense sensations, dreams, and emotions. And what’s fun about Hill’s paintings is that she confesses neither while hoping for both.
Conceptually, Hill’s multi-paneled constellation-like-abstractions speak to the relationship of figure, background, and landscape, yet they remain unlinked to any exacting subjective form. They float in a flattened ambiguous space. It’s in this ambiguity that the work takes on Surrealistic themes and Symbolist narratives.
