EJ Hill

EJ Hill

(b. 1985, USA)

EJ Hill practices endurance-based performance and incorporates painting, sculpture, and writing to examine the many ways in which physical and ideological bodies may transcend their afflictions. Recent exhibitions include Tenses: Artists in Residence 2015-16, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A., PIASA, Paris; and Surface of Color, The Pit, Los Angeles. He is a 2015 recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and was a 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Hill received his BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

An Arrangement of Perpetuities comprises four irregular sculptures of different dimensions, made from raw and manufactured materials. These are simultaneously massive and fragile; abstruse and poetic. The result is a system of intertwined elements, in which one – while being exploited – supports the existence of another. Inspired by the predecessors of rollercoasters known in the seventeenth-century Russia as 'Russian Mountains' (and in modern times referred to as 'American Mountains'), they are an elaborated outcome of the artist's research into complicated levels of physical and emotional states, including discipline, emancipation and exhaustion. The work is in an incessant process of transformation, evoking the seemingly uncomplicated relationship between control and surrender, absence and presence.