DAVID HILLIARD – THE TALE IS TRUE
2012-12-31In this new body of work, Hilliard continues to deconstruct issues surrounding familial relation-ships, and the struggle to secure a sense of self and place in a chaotic world. For over 20 years Hilliard has intermittently made photographs of his father, often including himself, exploring their relationship and the process of aging. In The Tale is True, Hilliard returns to the father-son narrative, using his multi-panel panoramas (polyptychs) to explore a family’s perseverance as they struggle to avoid an entropic slide toward ruin. Their Cape Cod family home, a legacy of generations of Yankee prosperity and tradition, serves as a symbol of identity, entrapment and history. Within these photographs, Hilliard unfolds the story of a father and son trying to maintain their physical and emotional footing while being swept up in the confluence of a complicated past and uncertain future. The tension between disillusionment and hope pervades this narrative, and is further punctuated by allegorical and symbolist cues within Hilliard’s multi-panel arrangements.
Much like the polyptychs of Renaissance ecclesiastical painting, each of Hilliard’s photographs offers the viewer the opportunity to explore from panel to panel the universal story of man’s frailty, and travails of the human spirit. Just as earlier paintings displayed stories or religious histories coupled with the mystical and mythological, Hilliard utilizes narrative and metaphor to reveal philosophical and spiritual themes of fate and faith, and the necessity of patience in adversity.
Exhibition runs from January 10th to February 16th, 2013
Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York
NY
10011
