RYAN HILL: EVERYTHING MUST GO

Join Civilian Art Projects for a lively, informative, and participatory artist talk with Ryan Hill, creator of the "Everything Must Go" exhibition.

Thursday, July 23rd, 6:30-8:30pm
FREE

Music and treats provided.

In his first solo exhibition with Civilian Art Projects, artist Ryan Hill curates content from the "digital museums" of Google, YouTube and Flickr and reassembles it as works on paper in the gallery space. Quoting, tracing, and drawing from internet images, the artist describes his intimate installations as "a free range of associations, from the gothic to the absurd."

Using tracing and transfer paper, colored pencils, inks and gouaches, Hill draws and paints humorous, sometimes dark, and varied images of heads, skulls, castles, bubbles, and chrysanthemums. According to the artist, "I view all these as fragile and self-contained worlds floating in the abyss of the blank paper." Heads and skeletons dominate the work."

"Considering a range of concepts such as growing older, mortality, and myth, Hill's inspiration for the series grew out of a personal photograph of his father "when he was staring off into space." Hill writes, "reflecting on how he was growing older, my understanding of his values and how much society stopped reflecting them back to him made me also think about myself. My father is the first iteration of Baby Boomers and myself is the last - ideas of progress, the Great Society, loving one another were constructed by his generation and deconstructed by mine. In that moment I saw that this whole social project was going to vanish with us and something we would never fully comprehend would take it's place through another generation."

"Everything Must Go" will be on view until Saturday, August 8, 2009. Also on view: "Upgrade," a group exhibition featuring Andrew Brown, Lindsay Buhman, Nicholas Carr, Benjamin Chetta, Cheraya Esters, Cory May, and Anna Wonson.

Civilian Art Projects
406 7th Street NW, Third Floor
Washington DC
(202) 347-0022