Lisson Gallery home page

Susan Hiller: Paraconceptual

New York, 28 April – 10 June 2017

Susan Hiller: Paraconceptual

Lisson Gallery is proud to present the work of Susan Hiller for the first time at its main gallery space in New York. The exhibition includes a selection of work from over four decades of her career focusing on themes to which she has often returned, encapsulated in the title ‘Paraconceptual,’ which sites her work “just sideways of conceptualism and neighboring the paranormal.”

Hiller has committed her practice to examining the cultural undercurrrents of society and its belief systems. Using a method she describes as “a kind of archaeological investigation, uncovering something to make a different kind of sense of it,” Hiller probes the unseen, unheard, unspoken and unexplained, and in the process has explored subjects such as lost languages, telepathy, dreams and automatic writing. The exhibition in New York will include the multi-channel video installation Psi Girls (1999), two rare and rarely seen paintings from the 1980s, new aura photo-portraits, a recent installation of holy water medicine cabinets from her ongoing Homage to Joseph Beuys series and a sculptural work on automatic writing, Homage to Gertrude Stein: Lucidity and Intuition (2011).

In Psi Girls, clips from five movies show adolescent girls performing telekinetic feats. Over five large screens the girls exercise their fierce and concentrated gaze to move objects by thought alone. Each part is tinted a different color and is at first silent, then joined halfway through by the pulsating, seductive rhythm of a gospel choir. The effect is unsettling; the soundtrack draws us into a dream-like daze, a suspension of disbelief, only to suddenly shock us into distanced scrutiny by the loud ‘white noise’ of a blank television screen. Then the sequence repeats itself, each scene now on a different part of the wall and in a different fluorescent hue.

Read more

Works on view

More information

Location

504 West 24th Street
New York

Opening Times:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00am – 6:00pm

View map
We use cookies on our website to improve your experience. You can find out why by reading our privacy policy. By continuing to browse our site you agree to our use of cookies Privacy Policy