Reviews & Writings
Crossing Safely, the new sculpture by Robert Hite installed on the grounds of St. Edward’s University in early April, commemorates the thousands of anonymous people who crossed the Mexico/US border in search of a better life. It was constructed out of 60 rusted and distressed metal sheets shipped up from a Mexican village and used to compose two nine-and-a-half-feet-by-ten-feet-by-one-foot freestanding panel depictions of shack houses placed parallel to each other, and accessible by viewers.
Hite recently reached an agreement to have the sculpture moved, in the coming week, to the grounds of the Texas capital’s Mexican-American Cultural Center in downtown Austin, near the State Capitol. Its currency is undeniable.
Simultaneously to all this, Hite is currently showing six large sculptures and nine photographs of his seemingly whimsical but ultimately dead-serious riffs on poor shacks and hovels remembered from his Virginia youth, or seen on more-recent travels around the world, at the new Susan Eley Fine Arts Gallery on the Upper West Side of New York.
An elegant man who has allowed his artwork to mature on its own, pushed only by his lifelong allegiance to the idealism of true human rights and increased equality among all peoples, Hite speaks of what he does in terms of what it can do. He wants to get people thinking about the nature of shelter and the need we all have for it; the tentative hold that we all have on what we think is stable; the beauty of decay, but also the infallibility of man’s striving for something beautiful.
He says that he has been thinking, next, of a new large work for New Orleans, dealing with the idea of race – possibly in the form of a black-and-white house sculpture: another bifurcated vision rendered with a visionary’s sense of the bittersweet frailties inherent in all beauty.
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.
***
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.