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| John, Eiger Direct 1966 archival light-jet print, edition of 5; 53.9 x 29.3 inches, 2009 |
June 25 to July 31, 2024
Link to images from the exhibition. Platform Gallery is pleased to present a second solo show by Stephen Hilyard. Rapture of the Deep consists of eight large prints of digitally manipulated landscape images. The series deals with the glamour of risk as personified by eight famous British mountaineers from the 70s and 80s, a golden age of high altitude mountaineering which made many of them national media figures. Growing up, these men were the artist's heroes—and they all died in the mountains. Each piece in the series is named for one of them, along with the location of his death. "It seems clear to me that there is some kind of connection between what drives climbers to pursue their sport and the concept of the sublime, when beauty and danger converge to create the profound," says the artist. "At the same time I believe that the sublime is in some sense a dream, an ideal that may be conceived but never truly realized. From my own experience I know how often the banal details of the quotidian world intervene when ever it seems near, and yet it remains in the mind and it is capable of driving the mountaineer to extremes, even to his death." The images in this series are of constructed landscapes, ideals that never existed, at least not precisely as they are presented. In the tradition of landscape painting the foreground of each image includes a single figure of a mountaineer complete with 1970s era costume and equipment. Over the course of the series the mountaineer descends ever deeper into what seems to be some kind of nether world of blue caves and canyons. These images were created from photographs made of underwater landscapes at Silfra, a unique location in Iceland. The fact that the original photographs were taken under water in some of the clearest and coldest water on earth creates subtly modulated lighting. All other clues to the origins of the images have been removed, for instance in most images the surface of the water above has been replaced with clouds photographed elsewhere in Iceland. "For this project I chose to conflate two wilderness sports, mountaineering and diving. They share many fundamental characteristics, they both combine elements of exploration, risk and solitude, together with some kind of quest for beauty. While it is true the mountaineer and the diver experience landscapes of hallucinatory beauty, it is also true that both of them are slowly dying every second that they are too high or too deep." The title of the project is both literal and ironic; the images are visually rapturous, in the kitsch sense of the title. On the other hand, ‘Rapture of the Deep’ is a term first coined by Jacque Cousteau (in French “L’ivresse Des Grandes Profondeurs”) to describe what is medically called Nitrogen Narcosis. This is a form of euphoria that divers experience below a certain depth and that can lead to death. At these depths high pressure nitrogen dissolved in the body’s tissues creates an experience both ecstatic and potentially deadly. This speaks directly to the nature of the sublime experience and the sacrifices that are demanded of one who goes in search of it. Stephen Hilyard was born and raised in Northern England. He studied architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Humberside, Hull, UK. In the 1990s, Hilyard moved to the United States. He received a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of Southern California in 1997, and since then has been making conceptually driven works of art, including videos, installations, photographs, textile-based objects, and wood-carvings. He is an associate professor of Digital Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His works have been shown at The Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN; the SOO Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis. His work was included in the group exhibition, Dark States, at Platform in 2005 and his solo show at the gallery, King Wave, was in 2006. Link to artist's main page
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