Contemporary Art Daily

Artists Space presents the first solo exhibition in the United States by British artist Hilary Lloyd. The exhibition will feature new work developed by Lloyd in direct relation to the architecture of Artists Space.

Hilary Lloyd’s work is predominantly realized through the presentation of sequential images, either within video or slide installations. This work is rooted in Lloyd’s observation of people, objects and spaces. Each individual piece portrays its subject in isolation: men working at an outdoor carwash in Sheffield, UK (Car Wash, 2005); the iconic DJ Princess Julia playing records at Queer Nation in London’s Kings Cross (Princess Julia, 1997); a motorway construction site in Glasgow (Motorway, 2010); a young man taking off his t-shirt (Colin #2, 1999). Lloyd’s camera acts as a voyeuristic gaze that addresses minimal, often repetitive movement and banal materiality. The resulting compositions appear at times staged and at others record the world from afar, examining the phenomenological interplay between the honed theatrics of physical activity, and the immaterial conditions of seeing and being seen.

The equipment used to display these images (monitors, projectors, stands and cabling) form a highly visible and fetishized aspect of Lloyd’s installations. Similar to the awareness of the body’s movement in space induced by minimalist sculpture, the amplified presence of the technologies of audio-visual display compels a physical dimension to the act of looking. Viewers are placed within an equivalent ‘scene’ of experience to that which exists between Lloyd and her subjects – a scene mediated by codes of posture and desire.

Hilary Lloyd (*1964) lives and works in London. Her work has been presented in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, amongst others at: Raven Row, London (2010), Tramway, Glasgow (2010), Le Consortium, Dijon (2009), Kunstverein Munich (2006), Venice Bienniale (2003), Gwangju Biennial (2002), Steirischer Herbst (2001), and Tate Triennial, London (2000).