Christine Hill…straddles a line so fine that skeptical viewers seem about equally divided between those who can’t believe it’s art and those who can’t believe it’s life. C. Carr Village Voice
Christine Hill will transform the Feldman Gallery into a "home office" in which the artist will be present to perform daily office tasks relating to Volksboutique's current entrepreneurial undertakings.
Hill creates art that looks like commerce: large-scale projects, which she calls “Organizational Ventures,” that are functional, economically oriented, and labor intensive. She has “worked” as a tour-guide, talk-show host, thrift-store proprietor, handbag designer, and rock musician. She uses the term Volksboutique as a product label, the aesthetic of which refers to accumulation, organization, and resuscitation of cast-off objects.
Home Office consists of a set of Portable Office Prototypes – five hand-fashioned steamer trunks, each containing the tools for individual office tasks: Reception, Accounting/Finance, PR, Production, and Management. They are placed alongside an unadorned office environment, to be unpacked and utilized in the course of a five-day work week. The artist will put these tools to use to oversee and negotiate a number of entrepreneurial works currently in progress. Thus, “business-as-usual” in the one-girl cottage industry workshop that is Volksboutique will be presented to the visiting public. Viewers may offer suggestions, partake in projects, inspect progress, and gauge effectiveness.
Displays describing Volksboutique past projects and future proposals are presented in a trade show format and include a scale model of an Ideal Volksboutique Accounting Archive Storefront; uniforms specific to role and job; exhibition drawings; a vitrine housing the new, subscription-based Volksboutique Care Package; and an abundance of items connected to the artist's collaborative liquidation of Joseph Meyers Stationer (with the proprietor Eugene Frank) in 2002, which significantly enhanced the inventory of the Volksboutique Archive.
In 2000, the Feldman Gallery exhibited Pilot: The Invention, Presentation, and Filming of a Late Night Television Talk Show, and a subsequent "episode" was created at MOCA Cleveland in 2003 in the form of a solo exhibition. Christine Hill has exhibited recently at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany and was included in the 2002 Liverpool Biennial, UK. www.volksboutique.org will be launched to coincide with the opening of Home Office.
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Inventory: The Work of Christine Hill and Volksboutique, a monograph cataloguing projects from the past ten years with texts by Lucy R. Lippard, Barbara Steiner, Doris Berger, and Christine Hill and published by Hatje Cantz, has just been released. The book is available at the Feldman Gallery and D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.) for $30.00.
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