EJ Hill’s Art for Bodies that Refuse to Comply

October 17, 2018

UCLA Department of Art Alumnus EJ Hill presented “Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria”—which translates to “Excellence, Resilience, Victory” in Latin—for the Hammer Museum's Made In L.A. 2018 biennial. In the work he used symbols of sport to ruminate on the nature of sacrifice, competition and achievement.

EJ Hill, “Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria” (2018), installation view from “Made in L.A. 2018,” June 3–September 2, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (photo by Brian Forrest, image via hammer.ucla.edu)

"All summer long, every single day, for every single hour that the exhibition Made in LA at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum was open (six days a week, nine hours a day, and six on weekends), the artist EJ Hill stood in a room known as the Vault Gallery at the top of a three-tiered pedestal, like the kind you see medalists stand on in the Olympics.

Visitors filtered in and out and went on with their summers while he remained there, sometimes alone, always unwavering, his gaze held often by something in the invisible distance. I thought of EJ, an artist I’ve had the privilege to know as a friend since 2014, standing there on his own many times throughout the summer. As our small family took our summer trips and sweltered in the Los Angeles heat, I was both haunted by the thought of him standing there alone, and moved each time he came to mind by the power and simplicity of his gesture.

Again now, with his An Unwavering Tendency Toward the Center of a Blistering Sun, a solo show at Company Gallery in New York, I am haunted by the generosity of his offering: both the one he makes to himself as a human living in a world with a history (and a present) that would annihilate him, and by what he offers to all who enter there. To hold the complexity of the work, you have to trace it back to the summer and to all that came before, to feel out and honor the roots."— Litia Perta, October 12, 2018

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.

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