Duct Duck Puce

Opening Reception:
Saturday, March 2, 2–4 pm

A photograph records a moment of light captured within the narrow scope of the camera’s lens. This process can negate other truths outside the frame. A photograph can, paradoxically, be capable of capturing matters unseen, pointing to phenomena beyond the rational and the science of optics.

What does it mean to represent subjectivities that constitute the build-up of memory? Duct Duck Puce is the examination of a life lived and avoided through the compulsive making and taking of photographs as a means of escaping and explaining dramatic events that broke with the real. It takes as its starting point images that caught something of the phenomenological, haunted landscapes whose impressions have lingered for decades. These landscapes lead to material investigations, where Hill-Carroll’s painted and sculpture interventions break the photographic surface: Duct tape rips areas away while resistance bands apply pressure on the images and their frames.

For Hill-Carroll, breaking the constraints of the photographic medium culminated in the freedom to return to the creation of new images that capture bodily residues and residues of human action. Her latest works, made in the studio and the non-space of the scanner, are meditations on the body and its decay in relation to objects and organic matter.

With Duck Duct Puce, Hill-Carroll chronicles the cognitive dissonance of photography’s capacity to both conceal and reveal. The removal of the apparatus of the camera, which once provided a safe distance, is brought to the fore through somatic interventions that create new surfaces of experience for the viewer.