David Hilliard: Sum of Our Affection at Provincetown Art Association and Museum by Carroll and Sons

DAVID HILLIARD SUM OF OUR AFFECTIONS

JULY 8 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; AUGUST 28, 2016 PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM CURATED BY BILL ARNING

David Hilliard: Sums of Our Affections Our brains are hardwired to focus on other humans, and once alerted to the presence of other beings, try and organize their multiple presences onto intelligible systems, diagnosing diagramming internal relations among the personages. A loves B, disdains C and wants to have sex with D. Are they alone in a room, near others or keeping a distance? We theorize that through their fashion, age, posture, surroundings, and demeanor that we have access to their interior lives. And we will, with an insupportable hubris soon imprint our assumptions to reality and hold them dearly until some clear signal comes to reconsider. This is wired into our psyches because it serves us well, generally, in navigating the complexities of daily lives. Entering a multi person business meeting we have to summarize and fix our assumptions to succeed in the gentile welfare of getting business done. Family dinners are psychological landscapes of a different kind; with both traumatic and loving back stories overwhelming the current stimuli of pleasantries about the weather. Today, we live in an age of ubiquitous photography that allows us to endlessly reexamine decontextualized microseconds and in them find some sort of “truths” about those depicted. Into this new landscape of psychological interpretation of ubiquitous photography come the elaborately-staged, multi-panel photographs that have made David Hilliard’s international reputation as a first rate chronicler of the landscape of human relations. There is nothing instant about them and their constructedness is their primary salient characteristic. Hilliard favors a triptych format, most often in the standard horizontal format, but sometimes stacked. When conspicuously cast into fictions the scenes can be better dissected for hidden meanings, in a way that draws comparisons with the language of classical painting. When analyzing a Poussin or a Gerome painting, art historians take every detail as deliberate and pay careful attention to the name on an inconspicuous book spine or the mythological scene depicted on architectural details, and Hilliard is as specific in giving us clues with which to extend the human figure’s interior lives and tales. In the process of staging his tableau with care of a Cinemascope filmmaker each of the three quadrants is planned to add narrative or psychological meanings. In Rock Bottom, or Boys Tethered two humans are sent to the edge panels of the triptych – the in between panel of clear water holds the weight of the insupportable distance between any two beings, and our curiosity to diagnose what separates the. The boys are linked by a literal rope, the boy on the boat looking back and the other boy avoiding his gaze. The matching chest tattoos link the protagonists of Rock Bottom; in this case the artist and his father, but that information should not limit the poignancy of the image to mere artist confessional. The father and son in Rock Bottom are clearly in their own psychological worlds and the

clear light of the panel of simple water in between them is open to interpretation, but I am drawn for it being the visual manifestation of all the knowledge that comes from lived experience an older person wants to hand to a younger person as a gift, but that can actually never be shared. The majority of Hilliard’s images in this exhibition have single players, putting more emphasis on the carefully wrought object choices. In Hulk, one of Hilliard’s best known works, the center figure – a young male whose sexually alluring physique, square jaw, direct expression and military haircut in a carnival setting trigger memories – scores of fictional characters like the tragic, violent and still loveable Billy Bigelow in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. The inflatable Hulk doll seems to be mocking his hyper-masculine self-presentation. The physical distances and the seeming indifference of his fellow humans on the right panel lead attentive viewers to fill in his back story with lifelong alienation from his fellows and fill his future with hard knocks, even if his come-hither gaze promises imminent pleasures in the moment. In discussions with the artist, I am hesitant to ever offer as specific interpretations as the one above about his specific narratives. I know they are mainly based on my own back-stories and not any verifiable proof. Yet that is the joy of Hilliard work. When I get to see new works by Hilliard, I never know if I will be left in an erotic swoon from his evocations of desire or be left in a puddle of tears from being reminded of my most complicated familial relationships. His vision is such that he combines a clear, analytic presentation of finely wrought fictions with the fully engaged narratives of a first rate novelist. In both ways he delivers universal emotional truths. -Bill Arning, Curator