{"id":6955,"date":"2016-06-22T14:39:59","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T14:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=6955"},"modified":"2025-01-09T22:00:45","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T04:00:45","slug":"on-lyra-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2016\/06\/22\/on-lyra-hill\/","title":{"rendered":"On Lyra Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are delighted to have graduate student Lara\u00a0Schoorl help us conclude our spring 2016 season with some thoughts on\u00a0artist Lyra Hill!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, remember (2016) at Conversations at the Edge 2016. Photo by Camarri Lane.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lyra Hill\u2019s work as an artist, curator, and performer expresses a deep\u00a0engagement with place, whether that is a physical location or conceptual\u00a0mindset. In her recent show at Conversations at the Edge, Hill used the\u00a0conditions of her immediate surroundings\u2014screens, audience movement, the\u00a0darkness of the theater, and recent news of Prince\u2019s death\u2014as raw material for\u00a0her transformative performances. These included the group meditation Breathe\u00a0With Cube<\/em>, an immersive performative reading of her comic Cat Tongue<\/em>, and\u00a0Happy Ending<\/em>, an enveloping new piece on death and what lies afterward.<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Cat Tongue, performance at Conversations at the Edge 2016. Photo by Camarri Lane.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although Chicago is not explicitly present in Hill\u2019s work, her work engages the\u00a0city\u2019s arts communities. Hill\u00a0is a graduate of the\u00a0School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was involved with groups such\u00a0as Xerox Candy Bar and the Experimental Film Society. After her graduation in\u00a02011, Hill founded and ran Brain Frame, a groundbreaking series of\u00a0\u201cperformative comix readings\u201d held at different locations in Chicago from 2011 to\u00a02014. She currently teaches teens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, hosts\u00a0numerous events around the city, and runs the radio show Magic Chats, for\u00a0which she invites people to bring in and talk about sounds and the unseen.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Cat Tongue, performance at Conversations at the Edge 2016. Photo by Camarri Lane.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hill\u2019s investment in place is also a commitment to being present. In her\u00a0performances, she is present and responsive to each moment, the particularities\u00a0of her surroundings and materials, the audience, and to herself. She weaves her\u00a0presence and her attitude of being present into multiple layers\u2014her physical\u00a0body, projected images, spoken words, written text. The complexity and impact\u00a0of these layers becomes clear especially in Hill\u2019s performance Cat Tongue<\/em>, which\u00a0tells a story about female sexuality, fantasy and power tools.<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Cat Tongue, performance at Conversations at the Edge 2016. Photo by Camarri Lane.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Cat Tongue<\/em>, Hill performed on a small stage at the center of three projected\u00a0films\u2014one projected in center of the theater, and two smaller films projected\u00a0along the theater\u2019s walls.\u00a0The two wall projections\u00a0feature documentary images of\u00a0hands handling tools. The center projection is a\u00a0color-separated animation built from three layers of drawings.\u00a0Each layer is drawn in a different color\u2014cyan, magenta or yellow\u2014which\u00a0pulsates\u00a0into distorted\u00a0dreamy images.<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Cat Tongue, performance at Conversations at the Edge 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The effect of this set up is that the entire screen throbs behind her, like a fantasy or the memory of a dream, both\u00a0real and surpassing reality, blurring that line usually drawn between the two. We\u00a0see two women working in a wood shop handling tools, talking, touching\u00a0machines and then licking them in a conceptually exploring way. They are not\u00a0necessarily becoming animal, but feeling out being animal in the way it is already\u00a0part of us. Alongside the images are printed texts which Hill also speaks. Occasionally, Hill\u2019s reading purposely slides out of\u00a0synch\u2014reading more or less than the audience sees.<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Cube, performance, Conversations at the Edge 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The narrative is thus cut open for imagination, and bleeds into the space and our\u00a0minds. The text trembles as her voice echoes the text and vice versa.\u00a0Hill is present in the work, forming another layer of the\u00a0work herself via her physical voice and\u00a0body,\u00a0but also\u00a0holding all layers together\u00a0by\u00a0mirroring the actions depicted in the projections. She licks the film\u00a0projector when the projected image of one of the women licks power tool,\u00a0she waves her hands at the hands handling the tools, and she\u00a0manually distorts her voice so that it resonates with the images of hands operating the tools.<\/p>\n

\"Lyra<\/a>
Lyra Hill, Conversations at the Edge 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hill\u2019s work is about the stories and the materials those stories are made of. She\u00a0is part of her own work, present in the space where it plays and she invites us to\u00a0be present with her as well, leaving us open to ourselves and the world\u00a0around us afterwards.<\/p>\n

Lara Schoorl is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory\u00a0and Criticism and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research and\u00a0writing concern narratives of contemporary art, theories of translation and\u00a0representation and Lorine Niedecker. She is writing her thesis on contemporary\u00a0conceptual poetry, Mieke Ball’s theory of a contemporary baroque and the\u00a0expression of the self. To approach her academic interest from a creative and\u00a0subjective perspective she co-founded and\/or is involved in collaborations with\u00a0the Amsterdam Writers Guild,\u00a0Potluck Salon (with Zeenat Nagree) and SAIC\u00a0MFA Show\u00a02016.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are delighted to have graduate student Lara\u00a0Schoorl help us conclude our spring 2016 season with some thoughts on\u00a0artist Lyra Hill!\u00a0 Lyra Hill\u2019s work as an artist, curator, and performer expresses a deep\u00a0engagement with place, whether that is a physical location or conceptual\u00a0mindset. In her recent show at Conversations at the Edge, Hill used the\u00a0conditions […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from On Lyra Hill<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":6956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[872,349,386,468,516],"class_list":["post-6955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-21","tag-essays","tag-lara-schoorl","tag-lyra-hill","tag-performance","tag-saic-alumni"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6955"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9858,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955\/revisions\/9858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}