Phantom Eye:
Jimmy Baker & Matthew Hillock
June 25 – August 8, 2015
Zhulong Gallery, Dallas, TX.
Press Release & Info
Zhulong Gallery is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition, Phantom Eye: Jimmy Baker + Matthew Hillock. This show will feature multi-media works on canvas by Jimmy Baker; and GIFs, screen-printed silks, and prints on Dibond by Matthew Hillock. Working through and from both personal and iconic narratives Baker and Hillock’s practices—when taken together—present the duality of language and image. While Baker builds upon extant images, adding to narratives, and perhaps replacing period content with the contemporary, Hillock’s practice paradoxically works through absence and erasure to present only fragments of more personal narratives. From these two poles, the exhibition itself takes on the behavior of the phantom limb experience wherein what the viewer senses is present may be erased, and where something that once existed is still sensed and experienced. As opposed to the phenomena of an amputated limb, Phantom Eye proposes ways of seeing and understanding that speak to loss, imagination, and memory while holding together the past and present.
Baker (b. 1980, Dover, OH) is a Cincinnati-based artist who layers digital prints, acrylic, oil, and spray paint to create canvases rich with impasto. His works push the boundaries of abstract painting by incorporating direct digital printing techniques, and allude to the proliferation and itinerant nature of images in our digital culture. Baker, who earned an MFA from the University of Cincinnati, has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Basel, London, Chicago, Miami, and held his first solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 2011. He has also been featured in Artforum.com, the LA Times and many other online and print publications.
Hillock (b. 1991, Harvey, IL) recently relocated to Chicago from Brooklyn and uses various mediums such as GIFs, panels of sheer silk, and painting to tell complex stories relating to his biography and others. His works are built up, then torn down masking their original subject matter to produce slippages common in language and narrative, which he believes holds us all together. Hillock, who earned a BFA in painting from the Pratt Institute, has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Paris, and Venice. Among other exhibitions, he has shown at THE WRONG: New Digital Art Biennial in São Paulo (2013) and the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial.
The exhibition opens with an artist reception on Thursday, June 25 from 6-9P, and the artists will present a talk the following day on Friday, June 26, from 12-1:30P. The exhibition will run through Saturday, August 8, 2015. Zhulong Gallery will close from August 9 – September 11, 2015.