This body of work stands in direct contrast to an aspect of waste removal which I observed on a daily basis in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for 20 years. Typically, refuse is brought to a transfer station where it is churned into smaller pieces that will fill huge containers more efficiently. Reduction is achieved through removal of air space. In this work expansion is achieved through the addition of air space. Physically, I am adding air to things, fluffing little things up into bigger things, wasting not/wanting not. The expression, Making Mountains Out of Molehills, is often used to express the notion that something is more basic than it claims to be. I am suggesting that, as a working attitude, the expression describes a kind of resourcefulness; a willingness to see a molehill as a mountain, a willingness to shift ones perception to embrace small as big, simple as complex, ordinary as elegant, low-end as high-end, easy as difficult, accidental as purposeful, incidental as noteworthy.
Robin Hill
October 1997
"Like the process art that followed Minimalism, these works imply the personal because they are so explicit and literal in revealing the thinking and actions of the artist. Hill's materials, however, are less forceful and dramatic than the wood, lead, or rope used by her forebears. She serves up light-weight, disposable materials consistent with the consumer electronics and computer era. She is attracted to the abstract adventitious beauty of circuitry and systems, but she opts for the slower pace and intimacy of hand-making."
Janet Koplos
Robin Hill at Lennon-Weinberg, Inc.
Art In America
June 1998"
The artist's ideas are about perception, as magic is. They are about limits and categories: Ephemeral as opposed to substantive, profusion as opposed to waste. They are about the recording and re-ordering of substances. Tied in with this are ideas of circularity, the mutability of materials and the illusion of appearances (as in magic). As a magician, Hill pre-determines the presence of air. light, weight, density and accumulation to re-instigate and re-vitalize the space around each of her objects. Her work is about many things, but it touches on the recording of ephemera, the beauty of appearances and of cross-referenced accumulated detail. Her homespun materials and repeated mark making create visual hymns to the powers of repeated movements and gestures. The rhythms of Hill's recirculated materials appearing in different contexts display a capacity for art making which is intellectually curious and elegantly resolved without undo mannerism. Hill's works seem to
be the vibrant residues, and the end result of a dialogue with haptic ( that is, tactile )space."
excerpt from "Seeing is Believing"
by Dominique Nahas
publication: Review
October 15, 1997
