Drawing is my primary medium. I find it the best way to manifest my thinking process. It's both spontaneous and conceptual which makes it able to record a steady stream of associations.

Depending on the ideas I'm playing with at the time, my materials and techniques vary from series to series. I enjoy making work that is personal but looks anonymous. My drawings usually go through a machine-like process to achieve this. I hide my hand by drawing images repeatedly, tracing source material, or using industrial design techniques. It's all in the service of making work appear effortness, a direct address to the viewer. While my work explores personal themes, I'm more interested in the cultural imaginary, or how people see themselves and make sense of the world around them.

My background in performance makes me very aware of the gallery as a theatrical space. For this reason I am interested in public spaces where people gather to look at the uncanny like wunderkammer, circus side shows, and flea markets. These are places where science, technology, politics, the military, religion, and culture intersect through objects that interweave and fabricate our sense of reality. These are places where viewers are free to make their own connections. I often show my drawing series in mixed groups to encourage this kind of nonlinear thinking.

My work is both serious and humorous, finished and unfinished, formal and kitsch. My best drawings are a kind of bewitchment, relying on artifice to provoke the smallest inkling of something real to hold onto.

May 21 – June 19, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, May 21, 7-9pm

Civilian Art Projects is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of artist Ryan Hill. In “SuperFacial,” Hill continues his process of exploring the contemporary cultural imagination through found images and word associations, welcoming the viewer into his imagination by exhibiting a related wall collage of ephemera, photographs, drawings and textworks, and a video collaboration with DC area experimental filmmaker Rob Parrish.