John Hilliard

Hilliard is a London-based artist whose investigations and evocations of the photographic effect led him to the mural-scale photo-works exhibited at The Renaissance Society in 1992. His pictures suspend belief in camera accuracy and commercial intentionality, not to repudiate the power of either, but to open a space in which the apparent integrity of the artist himself is questioned. The fact that a photographic image is always the result of a negative implies a structural reliance on otherness, and so his subjects are replete with duplicit codings of gender, race and sexuality. Jean Fisher, art historian and critic, discusses the element of fantasy in Hilliard's work, and how the artist employs the fantastic to reveal the conditions of "photographic reality".