Archive Project 13: Hilja Keading

Carole Ann Klonarides' Essay | Images from the Exhibition Hilja Keading Home Page | Archive - Spring 2002 Home

The Project Series
Project 13: Hilja Keading

Hilja Keading’s video installation—Backdrop— reflects her longstanding interest in issues of desire, illusion, and performance. For over ten years, Keading has created single-channel video and video installations that examine social and cultural norms, in particular, the discrepancy between facade and reality, judgment and perception. By transforming everyday images, sounds, and words into extraordinary and mysterious narratives, she creates environments that are profoundly moving in their evocation of both simple childhood joys and fears and complex adult psychological dramas.

Subtly influenced by Hollywood, where illusions are created and consumed, Keading addresses performance as a behavioral pattern along with the desire to create and believe in fantasy. She is interested in the desire to perform and the constant fear that what is—the unmediated, unadorned, “off-camera”—is not good enough. Her work investigates the impact of experience and memory on judgment, and examines the constructs of illusion and perfection—those stories, products, and other fabricated realities that drive one to search for an illusionary goal, that distract one from the truth, or that falsely promise control over one’s life.

In her past work, Keading’s interest in illusion and judgment manifested itself in explorations of absurd situations that reinforced an unreachable ideal by underscoring its impossibility. Her work attempts to deal with the struggle between the authoritative voice of society and the inner voice of the self—the conflict inherent in reconciling the gap between childhood and adulthood. She considers the conflicts of judgment—how something can be simultaneously beautiful, ugly, stupid, profound, tragic, and comedic. At the same time, her work contains elements of the performative ranging from the artist herself performing for the camera to footage she shoots documenting events such as circus acts and rodeo performances. Her work also incorporates the often unconscious processes of language and wordplay.

The exhibition of work by Hilja Keading was the thirteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator