Artwork copyright Gary Hill. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2023.

Artwork copyright Gary Hill. Photo courtesy of the artist, 1995.

Artwork copyright Gary Hill. Photos courtesy of Western Washington University, 2018.

Clover, 1994

Gary Hill
(American, born 1951)

Location: Western Washington University, Bellingham

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Clover is a video and sound installation by artist Gary Hill. The installation is made up of four outward-facing television monitor tubes in a square, showing black and white videos, mounted to a steel platform. The four monitors show black and white videos repeating independently of each other, in 5-7 minute loops. Each of the videos is a different version of the head and shoulders of a man, seen from behind. They are recorded with a camera that is attached to the man’s back. There is a wooded background around the man that continuously moves toward the viewer. Hill notes, “The men appear to be moving toward a common ground [in the center of the four TVs], a place which may or may not exist. Rather than the man being only an image, we see he is a part of the seeing apparatus, and thus ceases to move as the world passes by." Hill removed the standard outside casing of the TVs and arranged the monitors pointing outwards. From above, this setup makes the tapered monitor bulbs look like a four-leaf clover.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Department of General Administration.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Gary Hill is a celebrated Seattle-based artist who blends video, sound, and performance art. He started experimenting with sound and video art in the early 1970s. His artworks explore the boundaries between language and image, silence and sound, and light and darkness.

Gary Hill grew up in California, surfing and skateboarding. He moved to Seattle in 1985, created a video program at Cornish College of the Arts, and taught there from 1985-92. Hill has received many awards and exhibited in major museums in the U.S. and around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Centre Pompidou in France, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. He was awarded the 1995 Golden Lion Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale international art exhibition in Italy. His art was featured in two solo traveling exhibitions, organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (1994) and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany (2001).