The title of David Hilliard's upcoming exhibition, Tending to Doubt, came out of a
discussion between the artist and his mother regarding the latter's bible study group.
Hilliard — whose work often addresses personal and collective pasts through themes of
masculinity, coming of age, sexuality, spirituality, and family — offers up an exhibition
that allows the quest for spiritual identity to come to the fore. His subjects will be
familiar to admirers of his esteemed oeuvre. Hilliard's family and friends often figure
prominently in his work, particularly his father, a divorced navy veteran and self-taught
philosopher, and his mother, fervently devoted to both Florida and Christianity. Hilliard
employs panoramas of his atheist father and his pious mother as touchstones to encourage
a dialogue about spiritual exploration book-ended by these oppositions.
With his characteristic color panoramic style — most often presenting his pieces in two
to five-part tableaux — Hilliard conveys a contiguity that affectively mirrors lived
experience. His sequences of prints present to the viewer multiple perspectives on a
given scene, but the resulting visual narratives leave room for subjective interpretation of
how their plots unfold.
Joseph Guay's series of work, Memory Portraits, also addresses questions of perspective
and subjective experience. The pieces, photographic images with inlaid video
installations, present an engaging dichotomy between the stark minimalism of the
portraits and the fluidity of the video installations. The subjects themselves, people Guay
has met over the past three years in Atlanta, New York, and Cuba, filmed the video
footage featured in the work. He asked each to carry a small camera and capture, at eye
level, moments within their lives. The result is a projection of each participant's memory;
the videos capture in real time the images and experiences that inform a person's psychic
life.
For Guay, the artistic process extends past the tactile meeting of camera and light or
painter and sitter — it depends upon the formation of real relationships between people.
His work conveys that desire to connect to another person's complete life. Innovative and
powerful, Memory Portraits allows the viewer to inhabit another way of seeing, to
participate in the "collection and trade of someone's memories."
David Hilliard received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an
MFA from Yale University School of Art. A Guggenheim fellow and a Fulbright
recipient, he has received numerous awards and honors. His work is included in the
permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the
Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He recently completed
tenure as Artist in Residence at Dartmouth College and is currently an assistant professor
at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Joseph Guay is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work has been featured in over
twenty gallery exhibitions in New York, Santa Fe, Miami, and Atlanta. He has been
commissioned for commercial work both nationally and internationally, and his work can
be seen at The Palomar, The Loews, and the public collection of Burj, Dubai. He was the
assistant curator of the Sir Elton John Photography Collection and photographed the
album artwork for Collective Soul's eighth studio album. Prominent collectors of his
work include Sir Elton John, Ludacris, Ed Roland of Collective Soul, Rich Robinson of
The Black Crowes, and Kevin Willis of the NBA.
[email protected]
www.jacksonfineart.com
