Statement

Nate Hill is an artist living and working in the New York City Area.

My work speculates about natural and social systems that we sometimes think we understand and document, but can actually never completely comprehend. I like to explore this paradox and many of the ways we attempt to navigate it through a variety of processes including painting, sculpture, and other kinds of media.

Every day, living creatures, minerals, artifacts, articles, music, data, and knowledge are collected, described, saved, accessed, and preserved by institutions to record our human-centered cultural record. For convenience, we assign names and categories to different bugs or varieties of oak trees, minerals or particles, weather phenomena or astronomical entities. We also assign names and categories to our own representations and musings about these things in the form of songs, films, books, photographs, or digital media. When making sculpture, painting, or other work, I address the impossibility of making something consistently solitary, nameable, knowable, and unique across time when it will always be relational, interpretive, perspectival, and contextual.

Because of this approach, my dialogue with material often informs the direction a piece might go, both aesthetically and conceptually. The admission that nothing is static or permanently nameable results in unexpected discoveries, making every artwork feel like an experiment or a type of inquiry before, during, and after it is being made. Some of this results in experiments that evaporate or expire, without leaving any finished product. More frequently, I find myself manipulating wood and other materials into forms that merge the shapes of multiple living entities, their homes, their means of sustenance, and their communities into convergences and expressions of their life cycles. Other times, this results in messy compositions of liquid media and pulverized or shredded natural materials, especially sawdust, sand, substrate, and pigments, all carefully selected from their sites and origins (which are sometimes other sculptural works). My hope is that I can capture both seconds and millenia, the microscopic and the infinite, and a sensation of instantaneous completion as well as the labor and perceived durability that becomes evident in a process.

Bio

Nate Hill is a librarian, artist, and aspiring ecologist. His work has been exhibited internationally in places like the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Dokk1, and Community House Seoul. Locally, Nate shows with the BAU Gallery in Beacon, NY and had shown works at the Katonah Museum of Art, Bethany Arts Center, and others.

Nate is also the Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), a library network which serves as the institutional home for projects like the Library Field, Archipelago Commons, and the Creative Research Coalition as well as many others. Nate was a past affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, NYU's Engelberg Center for Innovation Law, and was a participant in the International Network of Emerging Library Innovators (INELI) with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Nate studied art as an undergraduate at Skidmore College, and got his Masters degree in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute.

Contact

Copyright

© All rights reserved. If you want to use anything on this site, please reach out to me for permission.