Gary Hill
Tall Ships

Gary Hill
USA, 1951–

Tall Ships 1992
12-channel video installation
12 modified black and white monitors with projection lenses, 12 laserdisc players and laserdiscs, one IBM-compatible computer with 16 RS-232 control ports and variable length, concealed switching runners, and controlling software.

Collection: Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Courtesy: the artist and Donald Young Gallery

Enter a long dark corridor, like a narrow harbour, and encounter a fleet of twelve human figures like tall ships adrift in space. They are the only source of light, their faces like white sails in the moonlight. Like the spectral figures in Dante’s Purgatorio, or the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, these phantoms stand silently, waiting, until you enter and disturb the fragile peace. As you journey into the stillness of this space, sensors are triggered and the nearest figure will move closer. Each apparition, whether man, woman or child, offers itself to you as if about to speak. Yet they stand, shimmering and silent, until they turn away, unable to unburden the secrets hidden behind their eyes. This fleeting moment leaves an unearthly, haunting sensation. Do we ever really connect, or are we just passing ships in the night?

American artist Gary Hill first exhibited Tall Ships in the early 1990s as he rose to prominence as one of the world’s pre-eminent video artists. While Hill has explored interactive encounters between life-size video imagery and exhibition visitors in other works, Tall Ships is considered to be the most profoundly immersive experience in his body of work. In the artwork, Hill allows his video art to move toward an expression of the intangible sensations that tingle on the surface of the skin, and linger in the dark recesses of our hearts and minds.

Tall Ships transports us from the real world, crossing into an unfamiliar world of experience where we discover lost friends and dream-like figures. Visitors to the deep spaces of Hill’s work transcend physical movement through the installation into darker, uncharted waters. Into the space of emotions, intuition and ghostly sensations. Into the space of premonitions, memories and dreams.

THAT PERSON, HOWEVER VULNERABLE, WILL COME FORTH NO MATTER WHAT. Gary Hill