The first camera was a darkened room. Through a pinhole, the outside world was reflected on the opposite wall, upside down. This capacious architecture of the camera obscura could host a body, becoming a refuge, a cell, a place to hide and spy. As ever, a moment in which one is out of view of others is an opportunity to sink into a more natural human state of relaxation, playfulness, and transgression. Enter the camera, enter the room. A private space — be it a bedroom, a broom closet, a cellar — can hold temporary sway over one’s psyche, instigating permissiveness. In its primordial stages, the camera provided this too, an opportunity to see while remaining unseen by those on the outside. Hardy Hill often situates his figures in nondescript interiors where these curious, impish, and erotic attitudes thrive. Hill, an artist and former theologian living in New York City, works most often as a printmaker, deploying precise techniques to construct disquieting environments in which ambiguous actions among men unfold.
Hill conjures these scenes and bodies from his own imagination rather than an existing reference from life or photographs. But Hill is no stranger to centuries of artmaking and in full command of the visual labyrinth that is the internet. What informs our imagination other than a deluge of images seeping into the subconscious? What is there to make of Hill’s latent contact with the image world? As of late, the diagrammatic qualities of Hill’s stark lithographs have given way to shadowy “nocturnes,” as the artist describes. These newer works are contact prints, resulting from a straightforward but meticulous process that brings the artist into closer orbit with the photographic. In Hill’s practice, photography is an invisible force that wields its power from the periphery, enacting both a dramaturgical and visual control within artworks for which it has no actual presence. Much like the elusive strangeness of Hill’s tableaux, the presence of the camera sits on the edge of understanding.
In 2021, Hill presented “Almost Blind Like a Camera” at 15 Orient, then located in Brooklyn. Across the exhibition, the lithe bodies of young men touched and entwined as if they were executing instructions from an unseen director. They are dutiful encounters, accented with playful dispositions and instances of grace and tenderness. At times, the men wield photographic instruments. Cameras are perched atop tripods; smartphones are gripped in hand. Their bodies match the architecture, denoted with clear lines and minimal shading. They are naked and the rooms are empty. In conversation, Hill discusses the influence of early Renaissance artists on his work, and the ways in which he draws upon their obsessive fidelity to logics of perspective, constructing environments that are impossible to witness in real life but make perfect sense when put forth from the artist’s hand. Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (1450) is a clear spiritual and formal antecedent to the works in “Almost Blind Like A Camera,” characterized by a preternatural stillness and intense division of interior and exterior spaces. Christ, far recessed into the background, merges with the column to which he is affixed, while three figures (whose faces are rendered with exceptional individuality) converse in the foreground like oblivious giants. Similar to Piero della Francesca, Hill builds out scenes of interaction and ignorance. Faces are of great importance for Hill, too, which he draws with a level of detail that feels disconnected from their austere environment. This facial detachment gives the figures a doll-like character, submissive and pliable but very alive.
In a second body of work included in the show, titled “Paper Children” (2021–ongoing), Hill introduces proper photography, and extracts his figures from the drawn world of interiors and recasts them as paper dolls in “real” environments, like storybook characters come to life across a series of silver gelatin prints. They appear pinned next to an ashtray, propped in a cupboard, or on a desktop, threatened by a pair of sharp scissors wielded by Hill himself. In seeing these vulnerable figures in an alien environment, I’m reminded of the infamous Brad, the elusive and intoxicating protagonist of Dennis Cooper’s 2004 novel The Sluts: “Nothing fazed him. All the time his cute boy face looked at me with his mouth wide open and made these sounds like he was scared to death and turned on at the same time.”1 Here, the subcurrent of dominance and submission is thrown into dark comic relief, a series of homoerotic Flat Stanleys flitting around the New York City flat of an artist. They could be torn to shreds or tossed in the bin with the greatest of ease. Who gets to play God if not artists? In the beginning there was…
And yet they survive, included in a vitrine in the exhibition, testifying to what they endured as muses. In tandem with these more sexualized considerations, Hill employs these cutouts in a nod to the ever-tumultuous relationship between photography and belief. These are his Cottingley Fairies: a phenomenon that transpired in the United Kingdom in the early 1920s when two young girls, Frances Griffin and Elsie Wright, photographed each other in the English countryside accompanied by cardboard cutouts of fairies sourced from a popular children’s book. In the bucolic photographs, the fairies appear to greet the girls with a charming allure. To the surprise of the girls, what began as a prank directed toward their parents resulted in a national frenzy. They catapulted to national attention when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the girl’s 1917 photographs to illustrate an article he penned for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. The nation was divided. Was this a hoax or a miracle? With fairies of his own making, Hill reconciles all possibilities, reveling in the merging of power, charm, and doubt.
In conversation with Hill, he notes that the work is less about sex than it is about his interest in his own preoccupations with sex. The clinical and graphic styles of his earlier work emphasize the importance of a degree of removal within the art. It is important to keep in mind Hill’s identification with printmaking — how, rather than drawing directly on paper, Hill finds greater efficacy in the engraving needle and plate. After each print is made, the plate is cancelled, emphasizing the making of the print as a singular event of transmission. On the occasion of “My Character,” Hill’s 2024 exhibition at N/A in Seoul, the artist published How Did You Get in the Building?, a collection of short stories whose title again references the transgression of a boundary, a move toward an inside. The volume is a work of fan fiction that places Hardy Hill at the center of the action, though in the hands of strangers. Contacting a cohort of popular fanfic writers from the internet, sending a portrait, stats, and a brief description of his life, Hill prompted them to write stories with him as the protagonist. One story details an encounter between the artist and an insatiable monster: “His heart pounded heavily, and his thin chest rose and fell rapidly. The beast tipped his dead down, his tongue tasting the human’s organ, Hardy pinched his lips between his teeth…” Through the imaginings of these writers, Hill endures absurd sexual scenarios in which he relinquishes control. He becomes material for the dreams of others. He becomes the paper dolls he photographs.
While this work of fiction echoes the intensity of writings by Cooper or Derek McCormack (see Closer, 1990, and Frisk, 1991, by Cooper and Castle Faggot, 2020, by McCormack), Hill pictures more chaste relations than the spectacular, zany sexcapades of Tom of Finland or other popular drawn erotica. Hill calibrates the action such that it exists outside of the world of the pornographic, laden with potential but never giving it all away. In lithographs exhibited in 2024, Hill added color and chalk, printing on papers in shades of green, taupe, and dark gray. The accenting of the chalk gives form to an imagined camera flash. Skin takes on a luminous quality, and subtle accents of color find their way onto the figure’s lips or the irises of their eyes. This new injection of light and color imbues Hill’s recent work with a searching, even forensic quality, in which the image lives as unplaceable evidence of an encounter. Though, knowing Hill, we know that these images have no history and no real personhood. Hill tells me he is an avid fan of Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century French philosopher of the Enlightenment, often pictured with a breezy, bemused smirk. Like Hill, Diderot mines immense stimulation from private cognition. As he wrote in 1762: “My thoughts are my whores.”2
In these recent exhibitions, the figures in Hill’s scenes (like Diderot) are often seen smiling. There is something both dopey and menacing about the expression. Framed by a surprising set of full lips, the gap-toothed grin in 3 Figures in Photograph (2024) portrays a glint of warmth, a fleeting moment of vulnerability captured by an imagined camera. The artist describes the expression as “an inappropriate gesture that cannot be sustained,” and one that found its way into fine art through the circulation of photography. In acknowledging the finite and mercurial nature of the smile, Hill recalls the writings of Gaston Bachelard, who notes that “the being of man is an unsettled being which all expression unsettles. In the reign of the imagination, an expression is hardly proposed, before being needs another expression, before it must be the being of another expression.”3 In this lies a feeling of indeterminacy and threat. I have yet to dive into the popular Smile horror movie franchise, but I am all too familiar with their guerrilla viral marketing campaign, which placed grinning actors in crowds at sporting events and behind newscasters reporting live. But allusions to sinister acts feel secondary to Hill. Perhaps these guys are just having a great time.
“Space is nothing but a ‘horrible outside-inside,’”4 writes Bachelard. This ambiguity of this assertion is captured in Hill’s nocturnes, made as contact prints from hand-drawn negatives. In this important, ever-growing subset of Hill’s practice, bodies coexist in the dark, illuminated by an unknown source, though the scene’s cool sheen would suggest the moon. In Figure on Back 2 (Sleep 5) (2023), a lone man lies prostrate in bed, his elevated head catching this mysterious light and reflecting back an image of a skull. With recessed eyes blackened, it is difficult to determine the figure’s state of waking. Light seeps in from gaps in the room he is in, and a four-paned window frames a foggy night sky. We are left to wonder what perturbed (possessed?) this man, yet, as with much of Hill’s practice, it is impossible to extract the body from this closed-in, private space. Hill’s rooms are chambers of the mind, mysterious cameras where unknown bodies emerge from the psyche and come into view. Architecture is an image machine. “And what of all the doors of mere curiosity, that have tempted being for nothing, for emptiness, for an unknown that is not even imagined?”5 asks Bachelard. Hill knows very well the temptation that comes with a door to be opened, and he dreams what might transpire inside. He opens the door.
