Artist Talk with Sol Hill

Premiered Jun 9, 2021 California artist Sol Hill creates photographic images that explore how the literal can reveal unacknowledged realities. Sol Hill: Signal from Noise, currently on exhibit at Irving Arts Center through July 24, features selections from two of Hill’s recent series, Token Feminine and Sublime Noise in which Hill explores expanding the visual repertoire of the medium of digital imaging and the intersection of art, science and spirit. Both series in the exhibition display Hill’s involvement with digital noise – the false exposure that occurs on a camera’s sensor from energy sources other than light. This digital noise is manifested in the visible, randomized colored pixels, along with long exposures and blurring, resulting from the movement of the subject or the camera in his work. After a print is made, Hill applies multiple layers of acrylic gel and varnish to the surface to emphasize the image’s physical presence, presenting his finished works in ways that blur boundaries between photography and painting. In the Token Feminine series Hill explores the mannequin in the storefront window as an idealized female image and a symbol of consumer culture. The artist employs a number of digital effects, resulting in highly abstracted images that are both painterly and cinematic. Photographs in the Sublime Noise series conjure mysterious figures in dream-like settings, implying a passage between states of human existence. In a variety of settings, the figures are transformed by light, their identities subsumed in a field of pixilated particles.