Writing Corpora, 2011
Installation and performance
Image: MARCO / Janite
Faithful to his interest in language and its shades of meaning and double entendres, Gary Hill plays with commonly known idiomatic expressions involving parts of the human body used to illustrate an accepted set of related concepts. He appropriates these phrases or expressions and represents them in their most literal sense, thereby revealing their incongruous or absurd nature. The allusions to the body thereby lose their reference to anatomic functionality and become part of a metaphoric and associative linguistic structure.
Writing Corpora is about translation. The expressions are translated from English into Spanish and vice versa, and from the spoken language to the physical language. In addition, through technology the artist’s body is ‘translated’ into a virtual existence in which the artist himself is given form. However the translations are quickly found to be impossible and start a chain of distortion and paucity of which the viewer is also a part, since he or she interacts with the artist’s virtual presence and the ‘materialised’ phrases.
