It’s a Friday night in central New Jersey and the artist EJ Hill Made me do a high speed upside down corkscrew while we rode green lantern, Six Flags Great Adventure’s slightly diabolical roller coaster seems designed to revamp your guts.
For middle-aged me, this was my first roller coaster ride. For Hill, 37, it’s his count. He is a coaster lover. Coaster toys littered his childhood bedroom in South Central Los Angeles.he knows Inline Twist from Heartline RollHe loves old wooden coasters and Tech madness, like the X2 There are seats on the wings that flip you over as many times as you go.
“For the first coaster, it was a bold start,” Hill said, eating fried food after the stomach resumed normal service. Kingda Ka, It was said to be the tallest in the world, but it was closed for maintenance. But Green Lantern’s front-row ride, where you stand rather than sit, made me feel unsafe. “I thought that if this got off track, we would be the first.”
The real takeaways for this excursion are: “Certain ideas can be conveyed very well through language and land. Other things you have to feel in your gut.
Coasters are more than just a hobby for Hill. They are recurring motifs in his performances, his art, photography, paintings and sculptures. “Brake Run Helix” His 18-month exhibition on October 30th at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) has a coaster theme and a spectacular centerpiece.
As a shape, the coaster gives the hill a visual pleasure. “Look, it looks like a line drawing,” he said in the twilight, pointing to the frame and curves of one ride as we arrived at the park.
But inspiration is also conceptual. He is attracted to coasters because of their contradictions. How the ride blends fear and joy. The way the experience is very personal yet shared with strangers. Amusement parks are, in a sense, a mixture of people from different backgrounds and leveled, but in the past, in many cases, Segregatedand today, despite the popular atmosphere, they usually charge high admission fees.
For Hill, who is black, queer, and from the Hood, where his outsider identities intersect, inviting people to a coaster might say something about his life experiences that a biographical litany can’t. No. And in the process, you might reveal something about yourself.
Art/exhibition special corner
“I feel like I have a very real understanding of physical threats,” he said. “Every day, when I leave my place, the threat to my physical existence is palpable.” I wanted to make a lot of people understand, but in a space of joy, I made them understand that I am a human being in the world.”
A few weeks after the New Jersey ride, I joined Hill at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. There he was setting up the show. In addition to coasters in the works, the exhibition includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, and wooden sculptures inspired by some of the new coasters he was finishing with the exhibition’s lead creator, Martín González. increase.
One sculpture contained railroad tracks that arced over a tower.The other had a wavy shape inspired by the semi-famous handmade coaster described by Hill. Oklahoma Land Run. They were intentionally rough, repurposing planks collected around the museum.
By evoking the structure of the enthusiasts you encounter Coaster’s YouTube Channel, the sculpture celebrates folk architecture. “The point is, you can make this in your backyard,” he said.
A coaster Hill designed with a friend Christopher Torres landscape architect, and skyline attraction, The Florida-based builder had yet to arrive, but numbers on the floor indicated its route. A Velvet Stage With his curtains covering the mezzanine, visitors climb into his one-person cart and zip across a track, also pink, on a 260-foot short but meandering ride powered by gravity alone. . (Although this work is technically designated a “rideable sculpture installation” for regulatory reasons, it comes with a trained operator and full safety protocols.)
The area below the mezzanine presents a painting of a leech, combining coaster images (frame cross-hatching, heraldic lines) with flowers and foliage in a kind of pink rural landscape. Some are reinforced with neon tube lights.Hill told me the show was his homage to coaster history author Robert Cartmel loved by enthusiastswas also painter.
At the scene, Hill huddled Alexandra Foradas, the curator of the exhibition, will brainstorm the details of the layout. He suggested setting up some benches where people could watch the riders.
“That sounds interesting,” said Foradas. She conceived the layout of a theme park that sees people step into rides and fly overhead. It asks us why we are so interested in seeing it go through.”
For a long time, Hill was noted for performances that tested endurance and emotion. The latest was at the 2018 “Made in LA” Biennale. Hammer Museum. Six days a week for three months during the show, he stood motionless and silent all day on a wooden podium.
The installation included grass fields and photographs Texas Isaiah Hill is shown circling all the institutions he attended, from elementary school to Catholic school to UCLA, where he earned his MFA. An elite setting—not only in school, but also in museums.
Erin Christobel, associate curator at Hummer and co-organizer of “Made in LA,” said some visitors flinched away when facing Hill on the podium, while others glared closer. I was. “The range of responses speaks to how well he’s doing his job: dealing with himself and embodying the human experience.”
The son of immigrants from Belize, Hill grew up near the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots before making his way to the East Coast. When a mentor recommended art school, he enrolled at Columbia College in Chicago, where Chris studied performance after learning about pioneers, including Burden. At UCLA he studied with performance artist Andrea Fraser, known for his feminism and institutional critique. In one project, he licked a gallery wall until his tongue was bleeding. His MFA thesis work included a month-long pledge of silence, ending with his throaty scream.
Over time, his playing acquired a certain tenderness. 2016 as Artist in Residence Studio Museum in Harlem He lay on the platform for hours, his eyes open, hinting at not only police and vigilante violence against black men, but vigilance, perhaps even rest. The platform was built into a neon-lit wooden sculpture of a roller coaster his track.
Painter Jordan Castile said at home that same year, “Watching him build a roller coaster and see the platform he lays on during office hours is one of the most difficult and beautiful experiences of my life.” I’m talking Hill added, “It inspires us all to feel deeper.”
Looking back, it’s that work and the work he did in 2017 for a coaster track sculpture. Venetian palace courtyard Stand on it for a period of time to mark the inflection point. His body disappears as the coaster becomes more prominent in his work.
“I’m no longer interested in being someone who performs for a greedy audience that wants to bless or consume me,” he said. I’m building this elaborate stage for others to perform while I collect and recharge,” he added.
‘He’s transitioning from his own body to a common body,’ said writer and curator Makeira Bailey, Exhibition Co-Editor and Interpretation Consultant. When visitors get on, they become performers, and everyone else becomes spectators. “It’s kind of ready-made for the idea of the performance itself.”
The show is already making headlines coaster geek online Those who called it “unusual credit” are for looking for its odd setting and limited execution. Hill likes the idea that the museum should welcome the coaster crowd he involves. “Even if you set up your own show, you feel unsafe here,” he said. “Places like amusement parks have audiences that feel more intimate. I can see myself reflected in many other people.”
Though his artistic resume has been lengthy, his instincts have been rooted in South Central (now officially South Los Angeles), where his mother and grandmother live, and plans to start a youth arts education project, and other I’m pulling him back into the black district. Prospect New Orleans Triennale, He created a sculpture for part of a Ferris wheel in the New Orleans East community, incorporating a gondola salvaged from Six Flags Park, abandoned after Katrina. welcomed.
At this year’s Whitney Biennale, he showed nothing — Except for the pink blank paper in the cataloga very spectral entity, almost unnoticed. guess what it means.
In fact, the page marks the “educational work” that Hill says is hiding from the spotlight for now. As Biennale curators Adrian Edwards and David Breslin put it in a joint message, the page “withholds space, but also retains space” for works that “should take as long as necessary.”
“It’s a total abstraction,” Hill told me. But how experts interpret his art, he said, isn’t all that important. “I am more interested in fitting into the legacy of those seeking to expand what it means to be human, in art and other fields.”