SLIP
The Westland Gallery
May. 12, 2024 - May. 30, 2015
Slip, a joint exhibition with artists Jenna Faye Powell and Jill Price, explores the ups and downs of contemporary life through metaphors of rough, rugged and disrupted landscapes. Jill Price’s new series of mixed media sketches and paintings depicting hills symbolically visualize her journey as a maker and all the barriers, pitfalls, plateaus, challenges and little successes she encounters each day as an artist required to meet the fiscal, administrative, social and household demands of everyday life. Narrative in nature, the hills represent Price’s aspirations to reach higher acclaim and status as a artist. However, as the process evolved, collaged paper elements of her day to day activities speak more of her journey, documenting her accomplishments to date and ironically forming hills beneath the artist. The illustrated broken ladders, empty elevator shafts, ropes too short and stairs that go nowhere, symbolize the artistic explorations, efforts, employment and education that have “seemed” to fall short when reaching for higher heights within her field.
Beginning to research the scientific formation and definition of hills, as well as revisiting the nursery rhyme Jack & Jill, several questions arose for Price around whether her limitations are in fact real or are a result of a self-fulfilling prophecy in which she continues to follow another, “jack”, up a hill, only to fall down on some ridiculous journey to fetch water, which we all know runs down and more likely to be found at the base of a hill.