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at The University of Chicago
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Publications

John Hilliard

 
 

1989, 30 pp., 5 color, 14 b/w illus., paperback
ISBN 0-941548-15-5
$15.00
Members: $12.00

 
  Essay by Jean Fisher

"I don't know what I'd do if he was one of the real ones with all the trimmings. He's got some girl in him, thank the Lord. I couldn't handle one of the real ones." -Jane Bowles

Hilliard is a London-based artist whose investigations and evocations of the photographic effect led him to the mural-scale photo-works exhibited at The Renaissance Society in 1992. His pictures suspend belief in camera accuracy and commercial intentionality, not to repudiate the power of either, but to open a space in which the apparent integrity of the artist himself is questioned. The fact that a photographic image is always the result of a negative implies a structural reliance on otherness, and so his subjects are replete with duplicit codings of gender, race and sexuality. Jean Fisher, art historian and critic, discusses the element of fantasy in Hilliard's work, and how the artist employs the fantastic to reveal the conditions of "photographic reality".

   
   
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