J. Tomilson Hill, a collector of Renaissance bronzes and contemporary art, acquired my sculpture of a mountain lion attacking a dog in 2018, after it was exhibited in a one-person exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. A year later he added Mime (2014) to his collection. Last spring, he asked if I would curate an exhibition of his Renaissance bronzes, my sculptures, and other works of contemporary art from his collection. I agreed, and was happy to have the opportunity. I was familiar with his Renaissance sculptures and had on occasion spoken with him about the collection.
The exhibition is at the Hill Art Foundation in a space that is both modern and corporate — if the two can be separated. They are surely joined together here by the designer Peter Marino, who is himself a collector and connoisseur of Renaissance bronzes. I would almost say he carries a strong sculptural aspect to his persona. A well-known fact is that some years ago the architect decided to always appear in public dressed in fetishistic leatherware. I see this not as a sexual trope but rather as something recognizably iconic, like a crucifix, or more specifically a piece of Renaissance art, magical in image, material, and scale. If he were viewed on a corporate pedestal he wouldn’t so much represent a cultural era as he would embody a whole curve of cultural space and time. The performative aspect of his social appearance seems somehow appropriate to both corporate interiors, Renaissance bronzes, and the power and wealth of the present era. It is here at the Hill Art Foundation, designed by Peter Marino, that the nine works of this exhibition will interrelate, hopefully generating reverberations that will spill out into the everyday experiences of a diversity of viewers. The title of the exhibition simply incorporates what is in the exhibition: three Christs, a sleeping mime, a last supper, and, upstairs, a pagan paradise.
I read recently that the universe, being approximately thirteen billion years old, went through an early phase of expansion that places the edge of the universe — the edge of everything that might exist, including the ideas of things that don’t exist — at thirty-three billion light years away, farther than we can ever access. Perhaps Jesus’s most important question is his most political question: Who is my father? American philosopher David Lewis poses a similar question concerning causal histories, “whether they are infinite or merely enormous.”In a universe that’s tens of billions of light years to its edge, within a structure in which every place is the center and everything looks the same from everywhere, we find ourselves on a planet with no god in any direction we look. How then do we make sense of the images of Christ in this exhibition? Or, more specifically, how do we make sense of any god in this particular universe? How do we make sense not only of Jesus’s suffering but the built-in structure of the devoured and the devouring? How do we make sense of physical bodies that coexist in a world of ideas: of bodies centering on ideas and of ideas centering on bodies?
J. Tomilson Hill, a collector of Renaissance bronzes and contemporary art, acquired my sculpture of a mountain lion attacking a dog in 2018, after it was exhibited in a one-person exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery. A year later he added Mime (2014) to his collection. Last spring, he asked if I would curate an exhibition of his Renaissance bronzes, my sculptures, and other works of contemporary art from his collection. I agreed, and was happy to have the opportunity. I was familiar with his Renaissance sculptures and had on occasion spoken with him about the collection.
The exhibition is at the Hill Art Foundation in a space that is both modern and corporate — if the two can be separated. They are surely joined together here by the designer Peter Marino, who is himself a collector and connoisseur of Renaissance bronzes. I would almost say he carries a strong sculptural aspect to his persona. A well-known fact is that some years ago the architect decided to always appear in public dressed in fetishistic leatherware. I see this not as a sexual trope but rather as something recognizably iconic, like a crucifix, or more specifically a piece of Renaissance art, magical in image, material, and scale. If he were viewed on a corporate pedestal he wouldn’t so much represent a cultural era as he would embody a whole curve of cultural space and time. The performative aspect of his social appearance seems somehow appropriate to both corporate interiors, Renaissance bronzes, and the power and wealth of the present era. It is here at the Hill Art Foundation, designed by Peter Marino, that the nine works of this exhibition will interrelate, hopefully generating reverberations that will spill out into the everyday experiences of a diversity of viewers. The title of the exhibition simply incorporates what is in the exhibition: three Christs, a sleeping mime, a last supper, and, upstairs, a pagan paradise.
I read recently that the universe, being approximately thirteen billion years old, went through an early phase of expansion that places the edge of the universe — the edge of everything that might exist, including the ideas of things that don’t exist — at thirty-three billion light years away, farther than we can ever access. Perhaps Jesus’s most important question is his most political question: Who is my father? American philosopher David Lewis poses a similar question concerning causal histories, “whether they are infinite or merely enormous.” In a universe that’s tens of billions of light years to its edge, within a structure in which every place is the center and everything looks the same from everywhere, we find ourselves on a planet with no god in any direction we look. How then do we make sense of the images of Christ in this exhibition? Or, more specifically, how do we make sense of any god in this particular universe? How do we make sense not only of Jesus’s suffering but the built-in structure of the devoured and the devouring? How do we make sense of physical bodies that coexist in a world of ideas: of bodies centering on ideas and of ideas centering on bodies?
Continue reading in the full text below.