BIO & CONTACT

Robert Hite is an artist whose movement out of the South and through the world suggests the essence of “yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago” (William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust). Born in 1956 in rural Virginia, Hite is inspired both by a rich southern narrative tradition and a closeness to nature. Hite has photographed and made a study of rural houses and shacks in Central and South America, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. His paintings, sculptures, and photographs come filtered through a lens on the natural world, layered with gestures of human and ecological struggle, and with a sensitivity to what is beautiful, poetic, and harsh within this interaction. In 1997, Hite and his family moved to an old Methodist church and parsonage in the small village of Esopus, New York. The clapboard church, built in 1846, calls to mind the imagery found in his artwork. Limited edition prints are available from galleries or from the studio. Each image is available in two sizes..!8x27" edition of (20) or 12x18" edition of (25).For studio visits and more information, contact: Robert Hite hitestudio@hvi.net http://www.roberthite.com Robert is presently represented by: CardwellJimmerson Gallery, LA, Calif The Aspen Gallery, Aspen, Colorado PearlArts Gallery, Stone Ridge,NY Violet Ray Gallery, NY,NY Espacio En Blanco, Madrid, Spain

REVIEWS

Exploding Art Scene by Emberly Modine, June 2008 www.buzzine.com

The offerings at Cardwell/Jimmerson Gallery were minimal. The exhibition “Colorblind: Black, White and Gray in Contemporary Art” offered up clean, black framing and what seemed like very simple images, but upon closer inspection revealed a complex art making process of incredible detail. Robert Hite’s work was the only photography in the gallery. A house reminiscent of Brazilian favellas sits on stilts over a lake. A thin five-story building with a pagoda-esque roof presides gracefully over a foggy swamp. A stilted long house falls into slow decay among the roots of giant trees. These environments seem so natural, until your mind catches up to the scale. Where are there trees so large that their roots almost match the size of a house? Robert Hite has built every single one of these structures. Models averaging eight feet in either length or height, they are constructed so masterfully, fooling the eye when placed in context of beautiful black and white photography. Not only has Hite mastered photographical application, but he is incredibly adept as a sculptor. The gallery owner informed me that the artist usually shows the sculptures in tandem with the photographs.

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The Animal Art of Robert Hite by Bill Lynn, Feb 2008 www.practicalethics.net

Rob’s early work routinely depicts people and animals through painting. The people are physically invisible in our field of view but are nonetheless manifest through their constructions. And the constructions are almost always juxtaposed and integrated into a landscape of animals and wildish nature. In my previous introduction to Rob’s gallery, I described this as a theme of ‘dwelling in mixed communities’. For Rob, dwelling is about people and animals living in natural and cultural landscapes. His art prefigures a vibrant vision of a mixed community of beings who are human and non-human, wild and domestic.

I think much of his latter work manifests this same vision, if in a different way. Take for example the sculpture and photography project, ‘Imagined Histories’. Here Rob creates sculptures of dwellings with a mythical sensibility, installs them in the landscape of the Hudson River Valley, and photographs the result. Displays of both the sculptures and photos are then shown in galleries around the Northeast. It is a beautiful body of art, some of which is shown here.

These sculptures and photographs are not adequately interpreted in terms of landscape art or sustainability alone. Rather Rob visually resituates human endeavours as part of a more than human world. He depicts humans as the animals we are, embedded in all we do in the natural world, dwelling amongst and with other creatures. He implies this through the scale of the sculptures, and the wildish looking locales in which they are photographed. His whimsical, mythological forms allow us to step back from current architecture and landscape development. To remember bedtime stories and ethnographic traditions of animal-friendly cultures, real or imagined. To envision other possibilities for living on earth.

Rob scales us down to size, visually, aesthetically and morally. He envisions a more humble humanity. And in so doing, he reveals an aesthetic and ethical landscape where we might live in a truly mixed community of people, animals and nature.

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