Reviews: Massachusetts

David Hilliard: Being Like
Carroll and Sons • Boston, MA • www.carrollandsons.net

Suffused with light and longing, David Hilliard’s new, achingly beautiful color photographs are filled with conflicting feelings of yearning and disconnection; desire and emotion are arrested in the frozen time of the photograph. In these multipaneled images, figures are suspended, lost in thought, watching, waiting, resting, or sleeping. Tantalizing narratives are suggested but not explained. We happen upon the stories Hilliard constructs in midstream and cannot help but wonder what has just taken place or is about to happen.

Hilliard’s technique is to create his images by combining separate panels hung side-by-side, arranged either horizontally, vertically, or sometimes in a pattern. The shifting focus of the panels and the spaces between them mirror the psychological remoteness portrayed, and the linear sequencing of the images emphasizes their narrative structure, like frames in a filmstrip. The distinct panels also serve to isolate figures from each other, such as the two teenage boys in Boys Tethered, who are physically connected but emotionally distant.

Light has a palpable presence in Hilliard’s photographs, bathing motionless figures in transcendent luminosity like characters in a religious painting. In Bleeder, for example, light from leaded glass windows streams down on a young boy who sits at a table in the dining room of a private school. He looks up towards the light, a troubled expression on his face, his white shirt and fingers stained by blood that drips from his nose. What might have been an ordinary scene of a boy with a nosebleed takes on an unsettling, otherworldly aspect due to the mystical nature of the light, the boy’s staged pose, and the chapel-like setting of the room.

The most poignant images in the show are the two of Hilliard and his father. Rock Bottom addresses the dilemma of honoring thy father (Hilliard chose to reproduce his father’s bluebird tattoos on his own chest) while at the same time asserting one’s own identity as an individual. Instead of the unfulfilled longing expressed in many of the photographs, Hug conveys a powerful affection between father and son, affirming that human connection is possible, even in the face of, or perhaps because of, impending mortality.

—Rachel Rosenfield Lafo

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