David Hilliard

David Hilliard

From BooklistAlthough interested in visual narrative, Hilliard found cinema too uncontrollable. He defaulted to the form on view in this album, roughly twice as wide as it is high. He adapts a practice of his factory-worker father, who made landscapes with images snapped in horizontal sequence that he mounted, overlapped, as panoramas. The son creates works with narrative implications; they are composed of two to seven images, are mostly horizontal, and are juxtaposed rather than overlapped. Some preteen boys wade and swim in a shallow stream; in the next frame, one boy sits on the bank, back to the camera; in the last, bikes lie on the opposite bank. Curve of stream unites the images, and central placement of the lone figure teases interpretation: did something isolate him from the others? Radiant color artfully diffused suggests narrative pre-Impressionist paintings like those of Manet. Hilliard's gay sensibility surfaces occasionally, as when a naked young man bends to kiss another lying on a bed, but so does heterosexuality. The time is always summer and the possibilities are nearly endless in Hilliard's marvelously inviting pictures. Ray OlsonCopyright