Our Country, Not My Country Painting

Sol Hill’s camera-based artwork is a form of technological mysticism, capturing images from the world, but showing us an alternate vision, full of errant visual incidents and covert meanings. The artist allows both reality and his intuitive intentions to reveal themselves with an unexpected poignancy. His process is both technological and poetic, showing the limits of the visible and the possibilities of seeing beyond it. Hill refers to his digitally captured photographs as “Metagraphs” because he employs digital sensors to record energies both visible and invisible to the human eye. He permits a variety of digital noise – extraneous energy in the form of electromagnetic energies, heat, and cosmic rays – to affect the image. Purist traditionalists might consider this technique a “false exposure”. However, the process he employs alters recognizable forms, producing a kind of meta-vision and revealing aspects of reality that we do not normally see. In this way he expands his vision and gives the viewer a look into a vast mysterious zone beyond our limited perception. These complex but meditative images, connected by components of science and spirituality are immersed in a palpable sense of time, absorbing viewers in a rewarding experience. Hill’s “Metagraphic” works are a fusion of science, technology, spirituality and art, tangibly presenting an a visual thumbprint of the energetic nature of the universe in extraordinarily beautiful images. Cinematic and painterly, Hill’s dream-like digital images, have a presence that holds the viewer in a mesmerizing, momentary gaze. This unusual visual sensation is partly the result of his meta-visual digital capture process, then enhanced by an exceptionally skillful application of traditional presentation and archival methods. The counter-point of tradition and ambiguity results in a stunning image. Particularly, his figurative images imply a kind of passage across states of human existence. Anonymity in a variety of dramatic settings, is transfigured by both light and unknown energies. Individual identities subsumed in a field of scintillating particles. In all of Hill’s works, the viewer gets a glimpse of an existential, ephemeral world. There’s a life brilliantly present but mysteriously immersed in time beyond ordinary reality.