I work across the areas of painting, photography and digital media. As a personally constructed system of signs, painting is inherently abstract while photography, an indexical sign left by a trace of light across a film plane, is unavoidably representational. Though such a clear distinction can be made between these mediums, the corresponding realms of representation and abstraction are far from being mutually exclusive. Most attempts to separate them are fiercely partisan.
My work in digital media explores this overlap of representation and abstraction by blurring the line between photography and painting. In the Red Gray Grid series, I use photography to re-present some of the more ephemeral conditions affecting a painting’s reception by a viewer—specifically, lighting, point of view and depth of field and their impact on surface and color. This work makes a maze of representation and abstraction by creating an abstraction—in the form of the print—from composite representations (photographs) of abstractions (paintings). One result is a tension created by the conflation of a physical surface and the surface of its representation.
Daniel Hill has been exhibiting in New York City and the northeast for over 30 years and more recently in Europe, Asia and Central America. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the collection of the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, AR, the Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute, Jingdezhen, China and in several corporate and private collections. He has been the recipient of a fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts and two project studio residencies at Painting Space 122 in Manhattan. He is a member of American Abstract Artists and is an Assistant Professor at Parsons The New School for Design.
Hill’s digital prints use photography, painting and printmaking to investigate surface and light and their role in the formation of images. The work is a meditation on the nature and meaning of the digital print in the context of the perplexing network of abstraction, illusion and representation. Subjects range from shadows on a studio wall to Hill’s own paintings and etching plates in work that causes viewers to question their relationship to and understanding of surfaces both physical and depicted.
Website
http://danielghill.com
