Altered States

Influential international artist Susan Hiller creates dreamlike works that explore the subconscious, the paranormal and the metaphysical.

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To see Susan Hiller’s exhibition, Altered States, at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, you must step into a dark space where fuzzy sound emanates from both sides of a curved wall. To the right is a viewing room with a big screen and benches for the 30-minute video installation Resounding (Infrared).

Its visuals are primordial – a yellow line undulates in the middle of the screen as red lines bleed away into blackness. The colours pulsate and, at times, the edge of the red line turns to a lush magenta.

One by one, voices with different accents recall stories of alien beings or unidentified objects. Those voices are merged with what sounds like radio or television static.

Hiller describes the 2013 work's multilayered soundtrack as including audio transcriptions of pulsars and plasma waves, as well as "static interference from radio and television programs containing traces of the Big Bang." 

You can’t get more primordial than the beginning of the universe.

This dreamy, cinema-like milieu is a good introduction to Hiller, often described as one of the most influential artists of her generation. She uses a variety of media, most notably video and photography, to explore the irrational, the subconscious, the supernatural and the mystical – realms often devalued in contemporary life.

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Susan Hiller, “Psi Girls,” 1999

Susan Hiller, “Psi Girls,” 1999

five-screen video installation with sound, installation view (©Susan Hiller; courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London)

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Susan Hiller, “Psi Girls,” 1999

Susan Hiller, “Psi Girls,” 1999

five-screen video installation with sound, detail of installation (©Susan Hiller; courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London)

Born in the United States in 1940, Hiller earned a doctorate in anthropology but left the discipline, according to her website, because she “became uncomfortable with academic anthropology’s claim to objectivity … she did not wish her research to become part of anthropology's ‘objectification of the contrariness of lived events’.” She has been based in London since the early 1960s. 

Hiller has been productive with more than 100 solo shows since 1973 and hundreds more group shows. Tate Britain recognized her work with a major retrospective in 2011.

She has also written books, including The Dream and the Word (Black Dog, 2012). It opens with two quotes that provide insight into her work. The first comes from The X-Files television show: “Dreams are answers to questions we haven’t figured out yet.” The second is from Hiller herself. “Remembering a dream shocks consciousness into recognizing forms of cognitive experience from which it is excluded.”

Other works in the show include Psi Girls, a five-screen video installation incorporating footage from various Hollywood movies about paranormal activity caused by young girls and teens, and G-STS, a series of found photographs (made to look like Polaroids) of banal scenes that contain some sort of ghostly or spectral emanation. There’s also Rough Dawns II, enlarged photographs of postcards that depict roiling seas, something Hiller has collected since the early 1970s. ■

Susan Hiller: Altered States is on view at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver from May 24 to Sept. 2, 2018.

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The Polygon Gallery

101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7M 3J4

604-986-1351

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