LA><ART

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 

The Barker Hangar / 3021 Airport Avenue / Santa Monica, CA 90405

Opening Night: Thursday, January 30th  at 7pm

 

EJ Hill presents a new performance entitled Signaling through the Flames, produced by LA><ART for the opening night of the 2014 Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair.

 

Dressed in a formal tuxedo, Hill performed songs in the style of the classic jazz lounge chanteuse. Hill has developed a songbook compromised of historical and improvised feminist texts inspired by current dialogue in popular culture surrounding our greatest female pop star, Beyoncé, who is both celebrated and criticized as a feminist icon. The songbook will also give homage to some of the R&B divas past and present who have informed Hill’s connection with music, and will examine his own relationship to feminism and intersectionality as a Queer, Black, American cis-male. Fusing song with feminist texts, Hill will present pop-cultural entertainment within a high art context.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

EJ Hill is an emerging Los Angeles-based artist known for his durational, physically demanding performances. Hill’s performances often possess an element of institutional critique or are direct in their address of politics around constructed identity and the body in gendered, racial and sexualized terms. Hill graduated from the New Genres program at UCLA in 2013 and obtained his BFA from Columbia College in Chicago. He has presented solo and group exhibitions at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles; RAID Projects, Los Angeles; NEXT Fair, Chicago; and A+D Gallery, Chicago.