Blair Saxon-Hill

Blair Saxon-Hill lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Her assemblage and collage works form what Saxon-Hill calls “impossible documents” - works that further a sensorium of documentation, perception and memory outside that of information and data. In 2016, Blair Saxon-Hill was awarded fellowships from both the Oregon Arts Commission and the Hallie Ford Foundation. More recently she exhibited a new body of work at the 500 Meter Museum in Sapporo, Japan, and her solo exhibition at Joan in Los Angeles received both a January 2017 Artforum Critic's Pick and the LA Weekly's Critic's Pick; her work was also exhibited in a group show at Venus Over Los Angeles.

This newest body of work draws from the 24-hour news cycle and intermixes the sensibilities of global risk with the bizarre spectacle of the body and its attire such as it is experienced in our daily lives as Americans. Inflected by the movement of people on the street, both houseless and housed, by images of migrant workers, and by the role of the studio, these works are at once unsettling and relentlessly funny. Speaking with a strong and distinct material vernacular, Saxon-Hill paints, sculpts, carves, and gathers the detritus of the world around us, projecting a register of reality all the more visceral when read in relation to our so-called “post-truth” moment. The poet Ben Lerner writes that we are a nation “calling out, not for help or air or light, but for information”: that we are less interested in effect or affect - in reality - than we are in its diagnosis. The show finds its name in this idea.